The Devil We Live (and Die) With
Cape Mongo, a film by Francois Knoetz, was featured at the 2016 Design Indaba conference last week. Portraying our detrius as monstrous creatures, Knoetz's film is about five mythical monsters that are created from our everyday waste: glass, paper, plastic, VHS, and metal. The film offers clues about the origins of each of the creatures and the temptations we face in falling prey their contents as they revisit their imaginary pasts.Knoetz created each suit and wore them throughout the streets of Cape Town. His performances took him everywhere from upscale malls to landfills to historic sites to street markets. His goal is to call attention to our ever-present relationship with waste as well as its intersection with issues around housing, food security, inequality, and racial segregation.Several other designers at the 2016 Design Indaba presented solutions aimed at dealing with these issues. Recent graduate Billie Van Nieuwenhuyzen presented Edelplast, a range of contemporary jewelry made from e-waste. Van Nieuwenhuyzen hand weaves discarded cables and then forms them into a marble-like material to create fine art pieces.The infinity burial suit by Jae Rhim Lee provides an alternative to the toxic chemicals that are currently used to preserve dead bodies. Lee contends that current practices deny death, poison the living, and harm the environment. As an alternative, she has designed a "mushroom death suit," a wearable suit filled with spores of a hybrid mushroom that aid in the decomposition of the body, delivering nutrients to the ground around a burial plot rather than delivering toxins.Kudos to the designers and artists at Design Indaba for giving us much to consider in how interact with the environment—in life—and in death.Sources:http://www.designindaba.com/videos/creative-work/francois-knoetzes-mythical-trash-creatures-reveal-our-terrible-treatment-wastehttp://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/e-waste-jewellery-looks-marblehttp://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/burial-suit-better-decompose-your-body