life and art, between process and product, between object and practice. What is the artwork? It is all these things—hanging laundry with Makka and my dance and the structure I built and the unlikely conversations over fenugreek sprouts. They have been a total experience. Sweeping up dirt and watering plants, building, sleeping, discussions, dancing, and maintenance mingle into one “way of life” rather than the museum of bell jars they are usually kept in. Even to say that the art swallows all these things feels wrong because it still assumes a neat distinction between art and non-art. When I build a hut, I wear clothes that I found and I eat bread from the dumpster. At that moment, it’s not “art” or “life,” it’s just what I am doing. It’s like being a child and decorating mud pies. It’s just what you are doing before you get up and run around some more.
APOCALYPSE ∙ An apocalypse is any universal or widespread destruction or disaster. Translated literally from Greek, a disclosure of knowledge, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation. Today, it is used to refer to any prophetic revelation or to the end of the world in general.
Work clothes acquired and worn while building various huts.
RAFAEL GAMO
Plastic tampon applicators over the doorway of Hut #4.
RACHEL EISLEY
In the 1990s I lived in Belgium, and was impressed by the preponderance of holy relics, dusted off annually and carted around for religious processions. A fingernail, a splinter of bone, a vial of holy blood. Seeing what we preserve and give value, I couldn’t help but wonder, what relics will we offer (consciously or unwittingly) for the future to know us by? Five hundred years from now, what will find its way into an overcrowded tourist Schatzkammer or a local parade or an archaeological museum? An ornately stamped plastic tampon applicator? A foil packet of emergency water? An Apple mouse box? And what will people make of these things?
The huts allow us to imagine a future that is looking back at our present as its past. An imagined reconstruction of our life and values (where, for example, tampon applicators are construed as good luck charms or door fetishes). I love projecting possible misinterpretations, the wonky telephone tag of time and apocalypse. And at the same time, the huts are an inkling of challenges the future may in fact hold. The condo of the future: fossil fuelless, built of waste, situated on the polderland of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Bundles for Hut #7.
ELISABETH FÆRØY LUND
While the huts are not meant to be didactic—neither a direct reprimand for our consumer habits nor an arts & crafts apologia for our addictions—they do inevitably raise some questions about where we’re headed. Rafael was a member of the maintenance staff at the site of Hut #7. He teased me for weeks, watching me haul in garbage and laboriously tie up bundles, and quipping about whether it would all stand up. But when the structure finally took form, he exclaimed, “Girl, when the shit goes down, I wanna be on your team! I’ll kill and you build.” It was the best reaction I had ever received to a hut. He got it: hut as dress rehearsal for the future.
Most people want to go inside my huts. I like that. I want them to be appealing spaces. But they’re a little sinister as well. In the artist statement for Hut #9 (which was made of 175 pieces of found electronics), I wrote, “This hut is a failure. It is not a proper house. It is not even a proper hut made out of electronic waste. It could poke your eye out. It could fall down. It is quite literally a house of cards, tied together with discarded clothing and straps—as precarious as our very practices of consumption, disposal, and planned obsolescence. Enter at your own risk.”1 A reminder. A warning. But also a reconception; the huts are more than just a novel way to ask ourselves difficult questions about the future.
REVISION ∙ A revision is a change or set of changes that corrects or improves something. Something (such as a piece of writing or a song) that has been corrected or changed. An update such as a modification in software or a database.
I have long been fascinated by borders. For years I’ve called my studio “The Border” with a little sign in burgundy Copperplate Gothic in the corner of the window. I love crossing borders on trains, watching one culture and landscape and language melt into another, in the same way that I love the permacultural concept of ecotones or border zones as places of increased richness and biodiversity. And I love the cusp between works of art and what Arthur Danto calls “mere real things.”2
The border between art and objects is not just about function (whether we choose to use the canvas as a lampshade or hang it in the museum), and it’s not just about the sanction of the art world as Danto’s account suggests. It’s about seeing differently, creating a mini-paradigm shift within one’s own vision. It is also about moving from a dead utilitarian seeing to a seeing that is charged with significance—maybe even beyond that, to a way of being that is charged with significance where meaning is not just created by net worth.
The huts are about this way of re-seeing, or re-visioning. When I spoke with anthropologist of waste Thomas Hylland Eriksen, he talked about rescuing objects that were considered waste and re-elevating them back into the realm of value.3 The huts do this. They lead us to re-see objects that we normally perceive as dead, ugly, unuseful, or don’t perceive at all, in new ways that are more alive. They help us notice their physical properties, think about their histories, and wonder where they are headed (landfill? ocean?). And sometimes they help us see their beauty or utility or that of the other objects we have forgotten.
This is where revolution comes in. Re-seeing is not just about sleight of eye, not just the old Wittgensteinian flipflopping duck/rabbit. Re-visioning is a fine-grained form of resistance. This gestalt shift has ramifications. This action is subversive. It might change you.
The potential consequences of re-visioning trash include:
THE (QUIET) MANIFESTO
That we find beauty everywhere
That material wealth and the constant upgrading of our material lives become less necessary than we think
That tastemakers and arbiters of value (corporations, governments, social heavies) lose the power to judge for us
That nothing is seen as waste (it may no longer be what it was; it may become scrap metal or firewood or compost, but it’s not “waste”)
That we notice our connectedness to all objects and beings—manufactured, natural, human, animal, plant—and maybe we think twice about our actions
That we remember the polyvalence of all things (a fishball can may be a fishball can and it may also be a planter and a table)
That we refuse to accept the radical devaluing of people and things that leads to genocide, ecological destruction, and systemic abuse; that we assert value according to different perspectives and systems
Fishball can tea tables at Hut #6.
ODA EGJAR STARHEIM
Working with cast-off objects led me to many places and people who have also been “cast off” or rendered invisible in various ways. In collecting waste, I found myself in toxic industrial areas, back alleys, loading docks, abandoned lots, and dealing with spaces and bodies of water that are at least temporarily discarded. I saw and met people who also deal with waste, much more extensively than myself: homeless people, nomadic people, professional trash pickers and recyclers, dumpster divers, janitors, maintenance workers, guards, facilities personnel, and sanitation workers. It’s often not a coincidence who is economically driven to take these jobs or live in these ways, and I was aware of my privilege in choosing to work with waste.