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RUS Miami. Three artist collaboratives explore the city's solild waste |
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Written by Carlos Suarez de Jesus
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Page 1 of 2 On a sweltering summer afternoon last month, a City of Miami fireman hosed down dozens of inner city kids trying to cool off during a raucous back to school party, from the ladder of his fire engine.
A few yards away, at the Athalie Range Park on NW 5th Avenue and 62nd Street, a group of curious children swarmed the rusty end of a sawed-off flatbed with the word “murder” spray-painted on a side panel. The makeshift wagon was hitched to a shiny U-Haul pickup.
A wooden pup tent-shaped structure towered above it. A jumble of mismatched car lights were fastened with plastic ties to the raw 2x4 beams and attached to a sound system rigged from electronic gizmos.
As the aptly christened Miami Trash Machine cranked up the noise, the tykes began squealing in delight and twitching like animated stick figures. A shirtless boy shimmied his hips wildly bouncing his green backpack across his shoulders to the syncopated beat blistering his eardrums. Another lad tickled a car headrest imbedded with a keyboard, rocking his head back and forth as the truck’s lights began dancing to the rhythm unleashed by his nimble fingers.
The rolling interactive installation that has transfixed these kids on the muggy August afternoon is the brainchild of Basurama, an artist collective initiated at the Madrid School of Architecture in 2000. Since then the project has evolved in scope but its focus remains the same: To study trash, waste and reuse in modern consumer society with a nod to the potentially subversive.
Basurama’s Benjamin Castro, Miguel Rodriguez and Antonio Lloveras recently spent nearly a month in Miami combing through our automotive graveyards to create works of art that offered a high-octane commentary on our pedestrian unfriendly expanses and crippling reliance on cars.
Titled RUS Miami, Basurama’s interactive exhibit was sponsored by the Spanish Cultural Center and produced in collaboration with New York’s Scrapyard Challenge (Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen) and local sound intervention collective, Viking Funeral (Carlos Ascurra and Juan Gonzalez).
Basurama’s RUS (Residuos Urbanos Solidos / Solid Urban Waste) project will be later staged in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Santiago: all cities where residents are more apt to recycle waste organizers inform.
Inside the Design District’s Loft Space, where the group’s trashtravaganza culminated in a lively bash August 9th, Basurama’s Miguel Rodriguez called their working process “una matanza de cerdo,” (a hog slaughter) and laughed.
The Spaniard and his partners, Castro and Lloveras, trolled South Florida junkyards in a rented pickup for the car tires, seats, head and arm rests, car lights and sundry crap they needed to recycle for their exhibit.
They posted several videos on their website (www.basurama.org) featuring the trio cannibalizing cars with screwdrivers in Medley scrap heaps. In these film snippets one observed them rifling through the rusting hulks of the Chevy, Fords and Hondas stacked like cordwood in local junkyards, for the discards they scavenged for their gritty opus. At Doctor Batteries, their foray into the realm of recycled energy storage, took a comical turn when a Cuban clerk ribbed them about their trashy experiment.
Back at the Loft Space they arranged the automotive garbage in a sprawling grid, from which they created the interactive results of the exhibit.
Near the entrance of the space, Viking Funeral hung nearly thirty car speakers from the rafters, connecting the wires together to form a haphazard spider web pattern. Beneath the dangling woofers and tweeters, tires, rims and car seats added a loungy chop shop vibe where spectators could sit and play instruments fashioned from stripped circuit board guts and miscellaneous car parts.
“These are like Moog synthesizers or theremins,” Rodriguez said of the tricked-out instruments. “There are keyboards inside these car parts and people can use them to create any number of electronic sounds.”
Walking across the Loft Space to the Miami Trash Machine, with which Basurama also staged public interventions at several other Miami venues, the artist paused to inform that responses to their mobile contraption varied.
“We drove it to Karma Car Wash on Biscayne Boulevard and Jimbo’s at Virginia Key. People there didn’t react to it enthusiastically,” Rodriguez rues. “At Karma people seemed more interested in scrubbing their Bentleys. Jimbo’s crowd was equally disappointing.”
He says that at Churchill’s Pub, the reaction was decidedly livelier. “We had nearly fifty people who engaged with the installation and some were mixing sounds on the beat board and even rapping,” he laughs.
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