ALCHEMY FOR A GLOBAL ECONOMY
Design Institute Gallery, RMIT, Melbourne, 2008
Alchemy for a Global Economy was an installation exhibited at the completion of a year long residency with the BioSpatial Workshop an inter-disciplinary initiative directed by Pia Ednie-Brown at the Design Research Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne. I am currently putting together a book of the same title which documents and discussed the work.
Alchemy for a Global Economy addresses the emergent aesthetics of sustainability. It engages with our anxieties about waste, pollution and CO2 and problematises the often simplistic appeal to the natural environment to save us from ourselves. It investigates the dual strategies of containment and transformation that are applied to the issue of waste. It asks how can we reconfigure everyday materials and practices into a totally different set of relationships – one that may potentially be more sustainable. However, in doing so it also satirises the growing economy of greenwashing and critiques the idea of change driven by consumption.
Several key elements of the installation are:
The Power of Shit is a battery contructed from beer cans, heat beads (charcoal for BBQs) and urine. The battery has the capacity to output approximately 1 volt per beer can. One of the key challenges of sustainability is the question of power. Here I investigated the potential to reconfigure the traditional ingredients of an Australian BBQ into a power source. The power from the battery is used to charge one of the Consumables mobile phones.
The Flow is an intermittent slow sand filter constructed from clear vinyl tubing, sand and gravel. Again this employs everyday materials in a novel configuration. The slow sand filter is a biological filtration technology, using the microorganisms which populate the filter to clean the water. The urine from the beer can battery drips through the filter and into the bottles of ‘Revive’ water, which is labelled as guilt free post-consumer waste.
Consumables are mobile phone casings made out of a starch based plastic. In developed countries mobile phones are used for a short period before being sent to developing countries to be re-used or recycled. My ironic contention, is that if the phones were edible we could solve the problem of world hunger without slowing our own extreme pace of consumption. The plastic, while developed from food technologies, has not been tested on animals and is therefore not certified for human consumption. However, with tongue in cheek, I suggest that this has not stopped us from testing things on the developing world before…
Greenwashing is a series of three video works and a sculptural piece consisting of a front loader washing maching stuffed with agapanthus leaves. This work deals with the increasing appeal of the green plant aesthetic in ‘environmental’ media campaigns, with the question of dirt and cleanliness and the poignant loneliness of trying as an individual to change something that requires collective action.
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