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
Turning Trash into Treasure
“Waste Land" was a project created by the artist Vik Muniz where he enlisted the help of workers from the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to create art out of garbage. Muniz raised over $250,000 when he brought the portraits that were created to an auction house in London. Mr. Muniz donated his $50,000 take for the sale of one man's portrait to the workers’ cooperative. An award-winning documentary with the same name was released in 2009 and some of the project's participants visited the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio to see themselves in Mr. Muniz’s 2009 retrospective. “Sometimes we see ourselves as so small,” one tells reporters at the opening, “but people out there see us as so big, so beautiful.”
In Cateura, Paraguay, Favio Chavez, an ecological technician at the landfill the town is built on, creates instruments for a young people's orchestra from trash. The “Recycled Orchestra” quickly gained more students than instruments. The students are beginning to take tours around the world and filmmakers are working on a new documentary, "Landfill Harmonic," to tell their story.
Another recent project intent on raising awareness about litter was created from 1.7 tons of garbage found on Mount Everest. 15 Nepali artists spent a month creating more than 75 sculptures from empty oxygen bottles, torn tents, ropes, boots, and every kind of camping equipment imaginable. Yaks, wind chimes, prayer wheels, and all kinds of unique sculptures were created. The works were exhibited in Kathmandu.
The mission of Emergent Structures, located in Savannah, GA, is to increase the value and accessibility of building material waste streams through facilitation, collaboration, education, and advocacy. Some of their projects have included a collaborative fundraiser with the Humane Society of Savannah that began with a call for submissions for custom built cat or dog structures made from reclaimed materials and the "This Ain't Junk" repurposing competition with Savannah’s Habitat for Humanity. Emergent Structures wants to publish stories from all over the world about reclaiming materials and encourage people to submit their projects to Exclaim Your Reclaim.San Francisco's Recology Artist Program in Residence provides Bay Area artists with access to discarded materials, a stipend, and a large studio space at the Recology Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center.
Closer to home, one of my students, Rick Diguez, was recently inspired to create a book made out of discarded stainless steel, left over scrap from a gutter installation. The result was a finely crafted book that pays homage to some of his favorite artists.
Also local for me, the Newburgh Mural Project is a series of inspiring outdoor paintings featuring the work of Chilean artist Dasic. This project has transformed old buildings and tunnels into works of art bringing beauty into neighborhoods struggling with poverty and crime.What have you seen lately that inspires you to turn trash into treasure?Sources:http://www.emergentstructures.org/http://www.good.is/posts/landfill-harmonic-making-music-from-trash-in-a-paraguay-slumhttp://www.recologysf.com/AIR/http://www.sierraclubgreenhome.com/uncategorized/one-mans-trash-is-another-mans-art/?pid=1836http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/11/turning-mount-everest-trash-treasure/4008/#http://www.wastelandmovie.com/synopsis.htmhttp://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/10/20/arts/design/1248069211361/clip-waste-land.html