The Center for Living Things is a research pata-institution founded in 2016 by the artist Diana Lelonek which focuses on the relationship between mosses, plants, lichens and garbage found at illegal, forest fly-tipping sites. All exhibits gathered in the Institute’s collection are used and abandoned objects, no longer needed commodities: the waste left behind by human overconsumption has become the natural environment for many living organisms.

Specimens originate from illegal waste dumping sites, where the entanglement of man-derived objects and plant tissue takes place. The exhibits collected by the Center for Living Things cannot be conventionally classified, as recently, waste has been imitating the behaviour of living matter. The Center for Living Things aims to describe the mechanisms at work in the sphere of rejection and uselessness. Here, products are no longer tools used by people but rather participants; Hence we cannot definitively separate the economic and social processes from the so-called natural process.

For Material Flows, Diana Lelonek has constructed a small garden of waste in the Amstelpark which will remain there after the exhibition. It is formed from living waste artefacts collected from wastelands in the peripheries of Amsterdam, and from her collection of the Center for Living Things. Her work draws attention to an unusual contemporary form of natural aesthetic and reminds us that the topos of unspoiled nature has long been nothing more than a historical construct.