Opening: Friday, August 8th, 6 p.m
The Rebellion of Waste is based on a chronicle of the same title by the writer Héctor Sebastianelli from Rosario, published in 1988 alongside a series of etchings by local artists. The episode narrated took place in Rosario in the 1970s, following a protest by informal recyclers in front of the municipal building, as a result of a conflict over waste collection. This rebellion, which ended in a recognition of the role of those who humbly collect what others discard, serves as a starting point to reposition what we usually call waste as active agents. The most common fate for what has lost its utility is to be placed in the symbolic sediment of refuse.
In response to this, we revitalize these invisible materialities situated between rapid consumption and the allure of the new, transforming them into particularly meaningful materials within contemporary productions. This entails a critical and political reflection not only on the ecology of things but also on the survival of materials, which are recovered from abandonment as a challenge to the structures that define obsolescence: When and why does something become waste? Focusing on these materialities means breaking the linearity from usefulness to discard, opening up other temporalities that incorporate the actions of collection, reappropriation, and reinvention. It is in this aesthetic conjunction between collection and waste that a material rebellion emerges.
Imagen: Irina Novarese, funky names for system perturbations, 2024.