The “garbage crisis” is not a calamity that struck Lebanon suddenly. It’s rather a legacy of the civil war (1975–90) and, as the referent suggests, one of several infrastructural ‘crises’ that originated with the postwar neoliberal governance. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the privatization of waste management in 1994 benefitted real estate, facilitating coastal land grabs and the destruction of local ecologies and histories of sustenance. This is Marwa Arsanios’ contextual engagement in her interdisciplinary artistic and research project Falling Is Not Collapsing, Falling is Extending (2017). It begins from a personal story and its connection to a larger historical event—the civil war—evoking hauntological affects and excavating material histories binding waste (management) and real-estate (infrastructure). Exhibited at Beirut Art Center in 2017, her project includes a 20-minute video projection, a series of botanical drawings from various dumpsites that hang on the walls of the exhibition space, and a constellation of topographic models mapping different landfills on the exhibition floor. The artist produces a politically valent multispecies ethnography, following waste to and from a dual perspective. The first is from up close, to convey an intimate portrayal of the dumpsite—the realm of waste and rubble, flora and insects, wind and water. The second is from a distance, to reveal the process of landfilling—“the burial of the sea,” as it’s said colloquially—and the appearance of a seemingly decontextualized operational landscape, infrastructure for real-estate. In a subversive gesture, her botanical drawings and topographic models appropriate botany and mapping, imperial technologies of seeing, to make capitalism’s socio-ecological destruction visible and knowable through them across scales. The political valence of this project, I argue lies precisely with its trans-scalar aesthetic—it insists on the necessity to relate precarious social-ecologies to political-economic forces and social-economic factors, and confronts the viewer with the urgency of committing to an ecological ethics. Drawings of resilient weeds evoke a sentimental response and a temporal return to the time of flowers, a confrontation with the question: what will it take to keep these botanical drawings from becoming post-mortem photographs? Abu-Rish, Ziad. 2005. “Garbage Politics.” Middle East Research and Information Project 45. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer277/garbage-politics. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, ed. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.