2016
2016
LIVE AT THE DUMP SERIES!
Songs of Memory and Forgetting is a site-specific installation and performance by Martha McDonald on the grounds of a construction waste recycling facility that processes 350 tons of materials a day. Within the mountains of rubble and cardboard you can see glimpses of people’s lives—clothing, photo albums, letters, tea cups—that arrive from house clean outs, often after an elderly person dies or moves to a care home. McDonald spent six months in residence at RAIR sifting through the personal items and felt a deep empathy for the memories imbued in these familiar domestic objects.
McDonald’s performance took audiences on an intimate song tour of the site, navigating through the sorting piles to explore the fragile nature of memory. McDonald and RAIR co-founder Billy Dufala collaborated on the music, which they performed using instruments found among the personal possessions. Inspired by the collecting and sorting carried out on a massive scale by excavators and front-end loaders, McDonald’s performance gestures activated objects made from thousands of photographs, pieces of silverware and garments she collected during her residency. Acting as a performative archaeologist, McDonald conjured the memory of the absent owners of these now silent artifacts.
During the Summer of 2016 RAIR turned our outdoor facilities into a screening venue, with showings of the movies Wall-E and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. We invited the general public to witness this exciting temporary transformation and enjoy RAIR as community gathering place. Before the movie we had games, a photo booth, and live t-shirt printing! We also served popcorn and refreshments.
MAD MAX SCREENING
Talking Trash invited sculptor Tom Sachs and Creative Time artistic director Nato Thompson—two exciting and original voices in contemporary arts— to use the dump as a platform for discourse about material sourcing, sustainable practices, and the dual identity of "found materials" as trash and as treasure. The talk was followed by a hot dog hangout (bbq) in the yard at RAIR.
PENN PRAXIS
Penn Praxis at Southeast by Southeast
PennDesign students Doug Breuer, Clay Gruber and Allison Koll collaborated with Mural Arts Program’s Shira Walinsky for WasteNot: a Penn Praxis Social Impact Project that brought together designers, community members and industry partners to collaboratively design and install the infrastructure of a community garden at SouthEast by SouthEast (SExSE), an activated storefront and community hub in southeast Philadelphia. A scaffold structure, bench, and long raised planter were built in the backyard of SExSE using repurposed wood sourced by RAIR at Revolution Recovery.
ABIGAIL DEVILLE @ SOCRATES PARK
Artist Abigail DeVille sourced a truckload of materials like wood, tyek, and tarps from RAIR for her sculpture Half Moon at Socrates Park, an outdoor museum and public park in Queens, New York City.
OLANRE TEJUOSO @ VILLAGE OF ARTS & HUMANITIES
RAIR sourced materials for Olanre Tejuoso, West African artist-in-residence for the international artist residency SPACES at the Village of Arts & Humanities in North Philadelphia. Tejuoso sourced 2x4s, metal chairs and cardboard for a series of window displays along Germantown’s merchant corridor. His exhibit Material Memory was on display in January of 2017.
HAVERFORD COLLEGE: PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM
RAIR partnered with students in the course Philadelphia Freedoms: Cultural Landscapes and Civic Ideals, a critical writing seminar at Haverford college to conduct a series of dialogues focusing on a collection of hand-picked trash artifacts from Revolution Recovery’s waste piles. This collaboration resulted in a zine of essays produced by students archiving the insights inspired by discarded objects.