Designing (Dis)Engagement: Reading the Throwaway Waste Exhibition as a Spatial Text

Grounded in discard studies and space-attentive discourse studies, this article reports a social semiotic analysis of the Throwaway exhibition at the Museum of European History in Brussels, Belgium (2023–2024). Paying particular attention to the exhibition’s compositional and interactive meanings, my analysis documents how waste and waste-making are narrated through a range of different visual-material-spatial resources; for example, diegetic and extra-diegetic framing, informational value and salience; stylistic and aesthetic choices; and tactile, auditory and interactive formats. As a form of public pedagogy, Throwaway encodes a contradictory way of (un)knowing waste whereby its core instructional objective of engagement is unhelpfully undermined by its disengaging design. Methodologically speaking, the article makes the case for reading exhibitions as multimodal, spatial texts rather than over-attending to their obvious representational content.