In this piece, twenty four bundles of trash items from the Goldsmiths MFA studios were carried across the neighborhood of New Cross by hand. During the first day and a half of the performance, the items were carried to Hartslane Gallery. During the second day and a half, all of the items were returned to the Goldsmiths studio.
This performance was meant to be somewhat absurd in line with the incoherence of dumpsters in general. Dumpsters hold the end of many different stories, or at least, they are where many objects make their exits from our lives. These assemblages that come from dumpsters will therefore carry stories that don’t make much sense; these things have already served their purpose and are part of the immense category of “junk.” Spending time with these items and making them part of a new story goes against how we are accustomed to dealing with rubbish.
Unlike some art made with salvaged materials though, I was not interested in recycling or transforming the waste into something else. The questions I tried to shape this work around were:
“How can I create and share a relationship to these objects that does not disguise their lack of function but which makes obvious my own and by extension anyone’s closeness to this massive, weighty accumulation of dead ends? How can I make visible what comes after the last recorded chapter in an object’s life without insisting that it has to be the start of a salvation story?”
This non-salvific awareness of waste and of my implication in ways of life that produce large quantities of waste is part of a broad aesthetic goal in my work. I want to to find ways of making visible material flows and forms of labor that are intentionally obscured in much of modern urban and social planning.