Material Politics and Discard Studies

The labour of love, home is a laboratory. What we think of as waste must become strange again.

The Collaboration

OpenCo. Is a collaboration between Fabio Meliffi and Giulio Laura. An attempt at decentralising creativity and using a team to support the making process. This duality is sometimes a spring board of ideas, other times a collaboration and other times again just a departure for us to start from. This experiment serves as a catalyst to the artist to achieve their own but intertwined ideas, interests and modes of production. All works remain the artists with an attribution to the think tank or physical help of the members of OpenCo.

Material Politics

Waste is an infrastructure rather than a behaviour. Material Politics is an interdisciplinary practice of research based around waste and wasting. We question the normality of discard and the assumptions around waste, its value and the wider systems that allow them to seem normal. Material Politics is a study of what is left behind, trash, rubbish but includes people, landscapes and lifestyles. The inquiry is interested in the dislodged, ignored, systematically devalued, ruined, erased, forgotten and otherwise cast in the negative. [1] Most of the greater part of trash exists beyond our view. OpenCo is discard, aming to defamiliarize the wider social, economical, political, cultural and material systems that shape waste and wasting. The practice seeks to contextualize the problems, materialities, and systems that are not readily apparent to the invested but casual observer. Discarding practices are about keeping certain players in power, who is benefitting?

Accountability

It is extremely important for us to not make others use our same reciprocities towards discarded material as that would become an act of imperialism. The art is not a ‘role-model’ exercise. People are differently accountable to all their relations. Different relations, different reciprocities, different ideas of respect. Relationality and respect look different to different groups of people and cultures. Because as humans we have different cultural or personal relations, a nuance set of relations, reciprocity and ideas of respect are required.

Sympathetic magic

‘Cargo Cult’ thinking is when we try to imitate behaviours without understanding them in hope to achieve a similar result. The practice is a jumble of records, historys, behaviours, deliberate fictions, and their ability to understand or misunderstand the incomprehensible events of capitalism. How do we behave around rubbish? How should we? Extracting, or Mining of discarded semi valuable materials from suburban landscapes are ritualized as a tool to describe the process of capitalist & imperial traditions.

Giulio Laura, Co-founder of Openco.

We mine what we value.

Reference:

https://discardstudies.com/ [1]