If you are on Facebook and haven’t yet, consider fanning the everydaytrash.com page. You’ll find all kinds of fun bonus material there, like this photo album of sinister Ecuadorian trash cans and the back story on why they’re all shaped like scary clowns and other characters.
Anyway, I’m still in Ecuador. Today’s trashy discovery: soda bottles recycled as puppets for community theater. In this photo my colleague, Lourdes, displays a range of heads to be stuck on broomsticks and dressed up for community health workshops and other activities. I’m attending a youth outreach day tomorrow and hope to see some of these in action. More to come. Update: photos of kids painting faces on the puppets now posted to Facebook.
There’s a fantastic guest post up on Discard Studies, a site run by NYC anthropologist in residence Dr. Robin Nagle. The blog’s tagline is “exploring throw-away culture” and the latest post by artist and PhD candidate Max Liboiron does just that in an essay that asks “Humans: Inherently wasteful, or good sterards? (And, why this question misses the point).” Read it. Then spend some time with Liboiron’s Web site perusing her past projects. Amazing stuff.
Detail of one of Liboiron's landscapes made of tea bags
everdaytrash.com marked today’s holiday in two parts: here and here;
Ruby Re-Usable of Olympia Dumpster Divers provides a comprehensive overview of decorated dumpsters in Seattle, photos and paintings of dumpsters and even dumpster-themed music videos;
Remember the dumpster video I shared a couple weeks back? (Thanks, Rebecca for sending this my way).
Well, I was so intrigued by The Dumpster Project that I looked the artist and asked for an interview. It turns out his studio is just around the corner from everydaytrash.com global headquarters in Brooklyn. More to come from that conversation (I am en route to Peru today and can’t access my notes).
In the meantime, track The Dumpster Project online. Displaced from his studio, artist Mac Premo decided to catalog and meticulously curate an autobiographical dumpster encompassing the myriad sentimental objects he has collected over his lifetime as a collage artist, animator, commercial director, carpenter, father and all-around pack rat.
Examples of objects to be dumpstered include:
One of his daughter Frieda's first shoes
And a bandage from the time he tore off a fingernail.
Premo plans to construct his dumpster for optimal public viewing and is currently documenting each piece to go in it on the blog. The piece will either tour the country or be left out for trash collection. Regardless of what the future holds, we LOVE this project at everydaytrash.com and will be tracking its progress regularly. To see Premo’s autobiographical collection of objects, New Yorkers can stop by during the annual Atlantic Avenue Art Walk, June 4 and 5.
There are just too many decorative dumpsters to contain to a single post, so everydaytrash.com is celebrating #DDD2011 in a couple installments. #1 is The Dumpster Biennale, an exhibition of customized wooden dumpsters in Australia. The show was part of the Street Dreams Urban Art Festival not this year, but last.
Dumpster Biennale
The dumpsters were little. And adorable. And a perfect fit for #DDD201. Check out this collection of photos on Facebook, and these images here on Flickr via witness 1.
Attention trashies. Decorative Dumpster Day is just around the corner. This Sunday, May 1, Visible Trash, Olympia Dumpster Divers, everydaytrash.com and our colleagues in trash will take a day to post photos of and reflect upon the containers in which we store our waste. For reference, links to the first time we tried this can be found here and here.
I have wanted to see Waste Land — Lucy Walker‘s documentary about Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and the huge trash portraits he created outside of Rio with help from local cartadores — for a while now. Somehow, I missed two or three chances to do so while the film screened in New York. Now, though, we all have another chance. Waste Land premiers on the PBS series Independent Lens on April 19th (check local listings). Or you can rent or stream it from Netflix here.
I got an advance review copy a while back and this past week had my friend Lisa over to watch it with me. Lisa is a sociologist who has lived for several years in India researching waste and water issues, which means she has spent a lot of time in dumps and with trash pickers (more on that to come in future posts).
I don’t want to belabor the review here. Short version: see this film. It made me cry. Twice. And I am not someone who cries easily.
The medium-length version: The storyline of Waste Land follows Muniz (via some slightly staged seeming Skype calls) setting up his project and getting others to help him execute his vision: to build large scale portraits of trash pickers using the trash they pick and getting those pickers to help him do it. Most of the film takes place outside of Rio at one of the world’s largest dump sites where you get to know an extremely compelling cast of characters who live and work there including a heartbreakingly young mother and the incredibly charismatic president of the cartadores association, which serves as a labor union and coop for the pickers.
Some interesting things I learned:
One, cartadores aren’t trash pickers. They are recyclable materials pickers.
Two, plastic is more lucrative to pick than glass according to the cartadores.
Three, Vik Muniz’ breakout show was a series of portraits called Sugar Children for which he created images of the children of sugar plantation workers out of sugar.
As an aside, during post-viewing Googleing, I found this story and video on Brazilian picker associations collecting used veggie oil.
Lucy Walker is also the filmmaker behind The Devil’s Playground, a fascinating look at Amish adolescence, which answered many of the burning questions I accumulated about the simple life during my teen years in Central PA. Definitely also worth seeing.
…is a really good show. Case in point, in a recent episode entitled “Garbage Island,” the character of Marshall gets obsessed with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Exciting news: Trash Mash-Up — the San Francisco-based organization that leads workshops on how to create art from trash — is coming to Brooklyn!
Trash Mash-Up
TMU, run by sisters Bridget and Jessica McCracken, will be in town working with Women in Need, a local nonprofit that provides housing, skills training and other resources to homeless women and their families. Stay tuned for updates. You can follow both groups on Facebook here and here.
Attn: Ruby Re-Usable and Little Shiva. Looks like there are some folks in the UK we need to recruit to participate Decorative Dumpster Day 2011. I found this link, then Googled “pimp my bin” and discovered a wealth of hits like the YouTube video below. Amazing.
Nathan Kensigner, featured here before for his documentation of infrequently frequented industrial corners of New York City, turns his lens on Newtown Creek in photos posted on his blog today.
Nathan Kensinger Photography
I’ve been traveling a lot lately for work and watching a lot of forgotten movies of the 1990’s on African cable. I can’t remember where or what film or TV show, but sometime in the last couple of weeks I saw a clip of the Newtown creek digester eggs as part of a scifi plot that used the images to portray some sort of alien energy production or a spaceship or something. It reminded me of the tour of the creek I got this past November from photographer Anthony Hamboussi.
Are you a fan of everydaytrash.com on Facebook? Check out our ever expanding album, Global Trash, made up of photos from Leila’s travels plus some amazing shots contributed by friends around the world.
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