In questi giorni di festa chissà quante borse di plastica usiamo, per cui mi viene in mente il recente lavoro installativo del collettivo luzinterruptus che è stato realizzato mesi fa' a Bordeaux per il Festival FAB, fatto con più di 6.000 sacchetti di plastica avuti dai negozianti della città.
CS
Last October the FAB Festival de Bordeaux, along with the city council, invited us to carry out The Plastic We Live With, a piece we had intended to materialize for a long time.
The idea was to graphically visualize, in a way that could be understood by all, the plastic excess that is around us, a recurrent subject in our work and in life, since practically everything we consume is either made with this material or it is wrapped in it or we are eating it in small particles in the meat and the fish we ingest.
Plastic we are and to plastic we shall return…
Recycling isn’t enough to tackle this problem. That’s why the French government, among others, has taken measures to reduce its consumption as much as possible by outlawing outlawing the usage of plastic bags at stores which are being replaced by paper bags or bags made of biodegradable materials.
This anti-bag context was essential to properly develop our piece in Bordeaux since we needed more than 6,000 units which we obtained at warehouses from all the city stores.
We intervened the old Virgin Megastore building with them, completely filling the gaps of its facade so it looked as if the plastic were about to blow up the building.
In spite of being a light installation, it also worked during the day. People could get close to it and try to recognize the bags from their favorite stores. When its interior was lit at night, the windows looked as though they were covered with stained glass though in a more plastic, toxic version.
The piece remained lit for 4 days and, once dismantled, all the plastic material was properly recycled, and the building was left in the same condition in which we found it.
This piece has entailed quite complicated logistics which would have been impossible to carry out had we not had the help of more than 30 volunteers from the Asociacion Bénévoles en Action. They collected the necessary bags and recycled plastic for 3 months, and also worked with us assembling and dismantling. We must confess that this piece belongs more to them than to us.
We wouldn’t have been able to do this without the active collaboration of of La Direction Généralle des Affaires Culturelles de Mairie de Bordeaux. They worked as a team during all this process and even agreed to having their offices filled with our plastics.
The Fab Festival de Bourdeaux squeezed us into their program and provided us aid and support at all times. Cote Ouest, a producer company, managed to make our weird requests real despite all the difficulties.
Our thanks to the Financiere Immobiliere Bordelaise real estate agency which lent us the building without conditions or objections, and to the Transfert artists who generously allowed us to cover their work for a few days. We promised to leave it in the same condition we found it, and so we did.
Special thanks to Lucas, Flavian, Coralie and Antoinette, for being such good brothers-in-arms.
We are amazed at how that which we shyly conceived years ago, has turned into a quite similar reality and we also managed, to our satisfaction, to remove most of the bags that had been stored by the city stores.
The images belong to Lola Martínez who braved her fears and climbed on to a crane to achieve unique photo compositions.
Time of installation: and installation:10 days.
Damages: none.
Exhibition time: 4 days.
Damages: none.
Exhibition time: 4 days.
