Wastealgia photos & videos by m.k.borowicz Wastealgia names a contemporary emotion.It describes the aesthetic pull toward what has been discarded.The photographs in this project document moments where human manufacture and geological process intersect. After a series of record-breaking extratropical cyclones swept across Portugal in early 2026, the coast felt recently rewritten. The storm rearranged everything.Shells. Wood. Seaweed.And plastic. Some elements looked almost ceremonial. As if they were left here on purpose. Walking along the coast, I felt something complicated and confusing. I expected to feel anger.Or grief. Wasn’t it all sad?Yes, but also strangely beautiful, I needed a word for that feeling.So I made one up.Wastealgia — the uneasy appreciation of what we’ve discarded. Wastealgia does not deny environmental consequences. It refuses denial in another form — the denial of complexity.The complexity of our entanglement with nature. When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with nature photography. I spent entire days outside with a Soviet camera I got from my grandpa. Back then, I searched for spaces that felt separate from human interference.I framed the world as if we stood outside it. We don’t. Wastealgia is what remains when you accept that.
