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A Coca Cola glass bottle I discard today can be unearthed a few hundred thousand years from now and be refilled and reused. This holds true for the vast majority of things we bring into our homes and later discard. The undying nature of these artifacts and their proliferation make them a valuable resource to understanding individual behaviour and in uncovering a collective history. As we delve more into this question, waste no longer seems like ‘matter out of place’ but a deliberate system to keep ‘matter out of sight’. When something loses its perceived usefulness, it quickly leaves our homes and begins its journey into the earth and its waters. Like museums that store specimens of our past in glass vials of formalin, we want to bring specimens of our garbage into an accessible space, where people can witness something that is actively hidden. In time our garbage will become an archive of the ever-changing nature of human aspiration and consumption.
Our sculpture takes the form of a human body cast in clear resin. The body serves as an encapsulation of our capacity to create, consume and discard. The transparency here is an invitation into the hidden. We hope that this sculptural installation will inspire conversations around desire, consumerism and decadence.
We want to invite people to come explore the materiality of garbage, and uncover and overcome one’s discomfort towards waste. We hope that this installation will get people interested in the journey of waste from the moment we procure something to when we decide to discard it. Our waste has a lot to say about ourselves. Our installation, ‘The Dark Fantasy’ is a playful/ provocative invitation into the narrative of waste.
Each item was captured in its raw form in isolation inside a black garbage bag. This started to become an evidence of our collective choices and began to hold an archival value of the times we live in. What we discard in our bins and hide in our black garbage bags today becomes a residue of our consumption and desires. And this relationship that we share with our own waste is what we call The Dark Fantasy.
This waste was collected through a period of 4 months. Not because we were looking for specific types of solid waste but because we spent a good time engaging with the stakeholders who deal with waste day in day out such as the waste pickers, the recyclers, labourers in waste processing units through the help of @hasirudalainnovations We wanted to understand the waste production and management system in a metropolis like Bangalore before we ventured into making something from it. It was through these experiences and engagement that the thoughts on the sculpture started to take shape to what now is a frozen-in- time humanoid with floating garbage that will outlive us.
Other technical information
This 8 by 2 feet sculpture is made from discarded garbage collected from various parts of Bangalore and casted in resin that takes the form of a humanoid. The garbage acts as material archive of our consumption while the transparency of resin makes it visible in the form frozen in time. The humanoid serves as an encapsulation of our capacity to create, consume and discard.
How many garbage articles: Over 400
How many sites: Dumping yards, waste processing units, plog runs, households around Jayanagar, Chikpete, electronic city, Hennur and some other parts of Bangalore.
Types of garbage: Metal, plastics, paper, glass, rubber, aluminium,
How many pours of resin: 250 (each pour 12mm)
For old times sake, here is a picture of me when I was 8 years old, dressed up as garbage by pasting packaging of products on me. I guess the idea of consumerism came in pretty early on!
