White storks—once emblems of migration are settling down thanks to the food stability offered by open landfills, creating stork “ghettoes”. Although a food scarcity in the 1970s reduced the population of the storks internationally, their numbers have boomed in southern Europe and northern Africa. The reason for their settlement can be found in how open landfill in south Europe and north Africa are structured.
Héloïse Charital and Ismaël Rifaï’s investigation offers a frame for exploring landfills as architectures of junk, with their own ecosystems and structures built on the waste generated by urban centres nearby. Three movies depicts and documents open landfills as artificial landscapes in which human networks encounter wildlife and modify it. At the same time it question how wildlife inhabits such space by appropriating existing infrastructure. Lastly it offers to look at architecture as a place of entanglement, confluence and encounter between the natural and the manmade.