Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork – including participant observations, interviews, archival research, and netnography – this article traces the material and symbolic trajectories of festival tents. It explores how waste-making intersect with comfort, pleasure, and sociality, but also with postcolonial entanglements and global inequalities. Focusing on micro-moments of ‘wasteification’, the study examines how tents shift from valued sites of intimacy and identity to ambiguous, discarded matter. This transformation reveals competing and messy logics: some tents are abandoned due to material fatigue, planned obsolescence, or cultural scripts of disposability, while others are salvaged, cherished, and recommodified. By attending to the ontological multiplicity of festival tents, the article contributes to debates on disposability, waste infrastructures, and the politics of material culture. As ephemeral yet materially persistent objects, festival tents illuminate uneven global circuits of production, consumption, and abandonment, emerging as evocative actors in broader discussions on waste, inequality, and material ethics.
Plain language summary for video abstract
This article explores the material and symbolic journeys of festival tents using ethnographic methods, including participant observation, interviews, archival research, and netnography. It examines how tents shift from being valued spaces of comfort, intimacy, and sociality to becoming waste. The study focuses on moments of ‘wasteification’, highlighting how abandonment is shaped by material wear, planned obsolescence, and cultural norms of disposability, while some tents are salvaged or reused. The article contributes to debates on waste, disposability, and material culture, showing how tents reflect global inequalities and the complex politics of consumption, production, and abandonment.
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