Wasteland 2.0: FAKE RECYCLING

Location: hARTslane Gallery

Date: 4th Oct 2019 - 5th Oct 2019

After we back from Porto, we dived straight into our next project. It was a proposal accepted by the hARTslane gallery and we exhibition in the early October. With the experience in Porto, this is we were more ensure about the environment issue direction that we are heading to. When we were making the proposal, we discussed and got interested into the topic of fake recycling, in which companies and cooperations gimmick of recycling but in fact just an illusion; and we were thinking to make a big structure of installation with idea of a maze, confusing circle and direction, furthermore we wanted the “wall” of the maze are weaved by recycling materials.

As we were discussing after the proposal was accepted, we decided to each bring materials from our own country as symbolisation of a global problem, moreover the international characteristic of our group.

In the end our made a long spiral tunnel structure with a circle in the middle, the wall of the whole structure is made of plastic bags, when the audience walk through the tunnel, they would experience a visual plastic blanket and maze, going to the middle they would discover it’s a fake circle with no other routine but turn back to the exit; this symbolised our thoughts for the confusion of the recycling system in the world and how we comfort ourselves to the environmental problem with the idea of “recycling”. We think that the biggest share with environmental problem is cooperational and national, they are the one who told us to recycle and they are the one who mainly cause the problem.

The things that I like with our group is the way we improvising when we were making our works, regardless of the topics: we always create a big, complex installation out of nothing in very least amount of days, and even though we were making the work together, every component from each person is different and the style we each create is different; we observed each other how to make and combine their methods with own methods, that’s why the entire view of the installation is very fluent as a whole. This is special thing about us as an artist collective that’s different from others, that we allow each other to fly freely under the topic and even adjust our concepts during the process. The way of improvising of our group is very interesting for me because I get the feeling of working together rather than showing together, in which the latter is always the case when I have group exhibition. I always think that artist is self-oriented and hardly work with others, but this experience with the wastelanders gave me the concept of collaborate and thinking art in one brain but diverse into different brains to make whole meaning work; this experience is very important for me when I back to my country and start a new collaborate project with local artists or even get back to the MAFA peers and collaborate internationally again in the future.