Bottom Ash Observatory

Bottom Ash Observatory is Christien Meindertsma's photographic account of what a bucket of incinerator bottom ash contains and what that residue is worth.

Thomas Eyck published the 160-page hardcover in English in 2015, in an edition of 2,000, with photographs by Mathijs Labadie and a preface by Meindertsma. The book takes 25 kilos of bottom ash, the residue of 100 kilos of burned household and industrial waste, and works through it step by step. The publisher says Meindertsma sieved and dried the ash, analyzed it with lasers and sorted tens of thousands of pieces by hand, then melted the 12 most valuable materials, among them zinc, aluminum and silver, into pure cylinders. Labadie photographed each stage with a telescope-style lens, which makes the chunks of material look like comets and meteorites. Thomas Eyck compares the precision of the record to eighteenth-century travel narratives about newly discovered raw materials.

Meindertsma was born in 1980 and finished at the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2003, then started her own label, Flocks. Thomas Eyck names Checked Baggage (2003) and PIG 05049 (2008) as the projects that brought her international recognition, and says her work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, MoMA in New York and the Textiel Museum in Tilburg.