Only Geology Lasts

The installation is reusing more than 15.000 expire plastic water bottles to create a dystopic landscape to walk through. It represents a reflection on a possible future in which the environment as we know will have changed entirely and we will have to make our way through plastic geographies and salt crystals lakes.

Only Geology Lasts aims to imagine potential effects of climate change, is an undefined landscape that can recall either the melting polar ice or a dry area of the globe, such as Kuwait and Spain, resulting in a waterless Salt Lake. These two scenarios shed light on the interconnection of both problems and solutions which represent global environmental challenges.

Only Geology Lasts also tackles two of the Sustainable Development Goals, nº12: Responsible consumption and production and nº13 Climate Action. In this direction, the installation reflects on climate change and the role we all play within it. Considering today’s production and consumption as global phenomena, where everything is necessary related, Only Geology Lasts encourages alternatives to traditional ways of consuming.

WONDERFRUIT FESTIVAL. CYM TEMPLE

More pictures of the proyect

Context

Wonderfruit Festival is an international music and art festival that is being taken place since 2014 in Pattaya, Tailandia. This festival is centered in the curating of ephimeral installations that, during the days of the event, transform the prairie where the festival takes place in a small city with scenaries and restaurants.

Proyect

CYM Temple (CYM de Cyan, Yellow y Magenta) is an installation mainly made using straps, those strong and resistant plastic strapts used to transport big objects.

Like the majority of the materials employed in the packaging and transport, its useful life lasts for the trip from the producer to the consumer.

In Pattaya´s dump and in several barns along the main road piles of these straps can be found, together with pallets and birch plywoods, that are also employed in the making of the packages.

But in a music festival, where takes place mainly after sunset, materials are as important as the light… Or the shadows.

Due to a simple light combination everything that was going into the CYM Temple originated shadows in the basic colours, blue, yellow or pink, inviting the public to enter, experiment and more around between the jungle of straps of the installation.

Navidad en RE ( RE Christmas)

Navidad en RE (RE Christmas) are three ephemeral art installations set in the CaixaForum facades of Barcelona, Madrid and Zaragoza. The installations are made with the trash produced  by citizens and instutitions that have collaborated by giving away their waste.

The main objective is to focus on the waste generated during Christmas. In Madrid, reflecting on daily consume using plastic bags. In Zaragoza, about housing using furniture and in Barcelona, about tourism using plastic bottles.

 

In Madrid the installation is a double facade, of irregular shapes like diamonds, that create a mosaic of colours and shapes, that reminds us of those Christmas lanterns that announce the warmth of these dates. More than 3.000 plastic bags were used in CaixaForum Madrid, plastic bag being the symbol of daily consume.

 

In Barcelona a cloud of 6,000 plastic bottles overlap the main facade of the building, the night lights enhance the snowfall feeling. we used the ones donated by the public that visits the cultural facilities, together with bottles from Madrid y Barcelona cafes, apart from other donated by the businesses of other cities, that will hang from 75 garlands. At night, all together will be lighted on, creating a snowy-like effect that will cover the yard.

 

In Zaragoza, the protagonists are 350 pieces of furniture, originating from the local goverment collecting service. The pieces, clim the wall from the bottom to 30 meters high in vine-like fasion. Previously they´ve been revised, painted, strengthtened and they are supported by a modular structure. The “invasion” of the furniture spreads over the ground creating an authentic furniture map.Furniture as a symbol of housing consume, of how design and decorations have been also become a fashion product that can be consume and throwaway.

 

Click here to see more photos about the construction process.

 

Moreover, RE Christmas includes two different workshops, “You are what you throw away” and “Mutant Trash”, adressed to schools and families. These workshops have taken place in 7 CaixaForum Centers around Spain. The aim of the workshops is reflecting about production, consumption and trash and making children aware that consumption goes further than just buying and that trash could be a creative tool.

Agostamiento (Withered). Abierto x Obras.

Basurama proposes an interior landscape for Abierto por Obras. It has been extracted from the plantation of 7000 sunflowers it has cultivated on Gran Vía del Sureste Avenue during the summer of 2016 with the community of the Ensanche de Vallecas area on the very southeasternmost edge of Madrid. An impossible public space welcoming everyone for a chat and a few sunflower seeds. (Sunflower seeds are one of the most popular snacks in Spain and have served as the cheapest form of entertainment for decades).

What was to be the main boulevard of the 60 meter- wide avenue is actually a secluded terrain vague of 350 mts long and 30 mts wide that has been standing there for years, waiting for a plan that is not to be completed. It is one of the many leftovers that the 2002- 2007 housing bubble left in Madrid when it bursted. A bleakly heartbreaking and unsettling urban landscape, set out to be and reinvented as an agricultural landscape, becomes a meeting place, producing both crops and relations.

Among the leftovers of the new city, there are people living, who have decided to take their lives and their communities in their own hands, taking care of them and its public spaces. When in August is time to plough, the cycle of life and inflorescence gives way to an space for life to be built and shared.

Photos of the process

Some more info:

 

The City is For Playing

The City is For Playing ephemerally hacked two of Sao Paulo´s most central highlines for the Virada Cultural festival. Viaduto do Chá and ‘Minhocão’ (elevado Costa e Silva) under spaces remain abbandoned decades after their construction and are the perfect examples of wasted spaces of the modernist metropolis.

Just with some swings made of ropes, reused advertisement outdoors and discarded tires, we transformed the use of this wasted spaces into vibrant, playful and diverse Places.
Workers and commuters, who normally avoid the areas, feel atracted by the balance of the giant swings.
Homeless people living under the Viaduto do Chá, started pushing the lonely visitors, receiving some money as gratitude.

‘Use’ is the soul of spaces. As Jane Jacobs announced, places full of people, are safer and happier.

 

Gatos Playground in Rio de Janeiro

When we take off our feet from the floor, extraordinary things happen. When we get out from this ground we are used to stay, we also get out from our confort space and we notice thing we usually don´t notice. We open the dors and windows of learning.

This is the aim of ‘Gatos’, an installation criated by brazilian office of Basurama with discarded metal oil barrels which transforms the courtyard of Rio de Janeiro´s Casa Daros into a playground for children under 99 years old.
In this square, children and adults can interact with the materials and the spaces, which show the creative possibilities of ‘waste’. To build this installation, were used more than 200 discarded oil barrels and an outdoor from a previous artwork by argentinian artist Fabian Marcaccio. The spaces can be freely interpretated and manipulated, entered, climbed, layed and so on.

City for Children Under 99 years old

The exhibition ‘Urban Provocations’, organized by SESC (Brazilian Commerce Chamber Social Service) in Sao Paulo, put together heterogeneus works related to city contemporary penhomenons as ‘right to city’, public space or equal right to play.

‘City for Children Under 99 Years Old’ is the interactive installation designed by Basurama with reused metal barrels and advertisement SESC outdoors. A playground designed for unlimited ways of using it as climbing structre, public furniture. The only limit is children imagination under 99 years old.

(RE)_Create Taipei

more photos

One of the main problem that Taipei city is facing today in relation with city development and urban planning is that common infrastructures such as playgrounds and other public spaces are been replaced by new ones made by plastic and with same pattern and same style.

We have identified several citizen movements against the standardization of this public spaces, that reclaim playgrounds more textures and designes, places that allow to imagine ways of playing rather than forcing you to play in an specific way.

(RE)Create Taipei is project that takes place in the Taipei World Design Capital 2016 framework. The project will focus on working in public space,urban waste and local communities.

The project take its shape through research, analysis, meetings, actions, events and installations conceived by Basurama and City Yeast together with other cultural agents and citizens.

The work schedule is designed with the following phases:

PRE-ACTIVE

INTERVENTION

POST-ACTIVE

Dates

Research

V

Analysis

V

Meeting with target groups

V

Workshop

V

V

Forum

V

Pr-design and prototype

V

Implementation

V

Exhibition

V

Website dissemination

V

V

1st Travel:

>> Meet our with our counterpart, City Yeast, to establish the objectives of our work, our priorities an a timetable for action
>> Participate in the seminar (RE) Create_Taipei: challenges for design and use of public space and public parks.

>> Identify potential intervention sites
>> Identify collaborators, from project partners to citizen groups
>> Study flows of trash materials and identify potential waste for the construction of new spaces

>> Carried out a workshop for the construction of a Bubble station, or portable office, that let us to make interventions in different spaces of the city to establish dialogues with neighbors and citizens about what is public space for them,how do they imagine public space, which colors they would like to prevail in these spaces,what kind of uses they would like to develop in public space…etc.

01

02

HALFTIME (APRIL-JUNE)

During this period, we have been working online, managing and coordinating the whole process, advising and sharing information using email and IP calls.

>> City Yeast kept stimulating the debate about Public Space through the Bubble Station built in the previous trip. We also kept on moving forward on the Communication between us and the citizens and neighbours, and we worked on the permissions so the interventions could remain until late October.
>> Together with the local agents, we have been doing an exhaustive search of the waste material to be used, either comming from industries or Taipei´s gardens and parks itselfs.
>> Basurama focused on the design and the creative process, digging deep in the possibilities of materials and spaces.
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2nd TrIp (July 8-24th)

We arrived in Taipei with the places to be intervened, target users already chosen and with a whole imaginary for both spaces.

The  Kid Ambition Park or Watertank Playground is located in southeast Jhongxiao Rd. and Jinhua Rd, close to a kindergarden.
The intervention consits in one huge water tank formerly used for industrial refrigeration and five other tanks of different dimensions used for home refrigeration systems.

Our working process with the material used for this intervention started by taking care of the material, fixing it, and adapting it to its new purpose. Every tank was cleaned and protected with the proper varnish before combined them together to create a new an unique park in Taipei. This is, probably, the first park ever created only with reused water tanks.

The main objetive of the park is exploration and discovery. We pretend to encourage free play, no indications, let the kids become explorers searching for new paths in the same park, able to create their own itineraries.

We designed a place where kids can feel free while playing, with places to hide and secret corners but allowing the grown-ups to watch them. We achieve this by using holes or by playing with the dimensions and the points of view, so the adults can watch them without being seen.

> The largest tank works as a big fishbowl with hanging elements. The inner space is cozy and encourage a new way of looking, since the open end frames the sky and the buildings, creating new perspectives. Furthermore, the open end that acts as an entrance also has an slide and a sort of climbing device .

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> The spyhole room works as a ball pit, but also as a poetic space, a place with infinite illumination posibilities thanks to the hundred holes that filter the light through the interior, projecting shadows that change during the day.

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> Tanks of different sizes form the labyrinth. The maze interior is covered with different textures: mirrors, bubbles, tree bark, soft walls and grasslike patched seats, a pletora of outside-school learning tools.

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> The tunnel is a passing place, also a den, a cave to protect oneself from the rain or the sun, to relax in the softness of the pompoms that cover ir.

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The second intervention Civic Swing Space or LampPost Open Space  can be found under the Bridge of Shimin boulevar in the union between Civic Boulevard, section 3 and Andong street. The space aim is going beyond a play yard or a park. It meant to be a new multipurpose space in the city, a gathering place with swings, chilling areas and even a stage for several prouposes.

 

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3rd TrIp (october 8-20th)

On October the 13rd  the Exhibition of the  World Design Capital Taipei 2016 was inaugurated in Sonshang Creative Park. Our project, (Re)_Create Taipei,  was included in the pavillion of Taipei Issuuuue.

You can check the summary vídeo 🙂

The TreeTrash. “Christmas by pedaling”

A cardboard mountain with the shaped of a Christmas tree, which objective is to visualize overconsumption. The tree was illuminated by pedaling in several bikes of CiclaLab.

The TreeTrash was exhibited from 22 December 2015 to 4 January 2016 in Madrid City Council.

In Madrid tons of cardboard are discarded daily. The streets of the city, especially the most commercial areas, are filled with cardboard every day when stores closed. Cardboard is the maximum symbol of consumption. Almost every imaginable material: toys, clothes, household and electrical appliances… are transported in cardboard boxes from all over the world.

One of these giant cardboard accumulations became the Christmas tree of Madrid City Council in 2015. An icon of consumption built with the remains of consumption. We built the tree during 3 days with the cardboard collected after a Trash Safari in the streets of the city. The tree dimensions were over 9 meters high and 5 meters in his base. The construction was made together with volunteers during an open to participation workshop.

In the following video you can see the collection and construction process .

Instalación realizada en el marco de “Navidad a pedales“. Proyecto ideado por CiclaLab. Un icono navideño iluminado con tu energía.

 

It’s all yours Gulbenkian

  more photos

We are what we throw away! Our trash defines us, it is the shadow of what we are, part of our memory.

During  three months the Gulbenkian Foundation and Museum have carefully collected all inorganic waste produced, both by its employees and visitors. From the tips of the pencils, to bottle caps, to obsolete brochures or to all the little holes drilled on the paper sheets. A trash catalog of what’s making, doing and living left behind.

With all that waste we made an art installation in the main entrance of the Gulbenkian Museum, it was ordered by colors, textures … shaping a new landscape. A landscape that coexisted with the garden on the other side of the glass, and in which visitors are immersed. Visitors will walk trough all this ​​small treasures, looking, searching and selecting pieces. All those object will be converted into unique souvenirs, and exclusive piece for each visitor.