Phase 1 – Mark Champkins, Science Museum Inventor-in-Residence
Tuesday 15 July was the last day of sorting through Museum waste for The Rubbish Collection project, and my last chance to put in a shift filtering through discarded drinks bottles and leftover lunches.
The project is fascinating. It aims to examine what constitutes the waste that passes through the Museum, where it would normally go, and what might be usefully recycled.
The exhibition is split into two parts. The first involves the collection of every piece of waste generated by the Museum over a month. A team of volunteers has been sorting and photographing the contents of the Museum’s rubbish bags, and pulling out items of particular interest. The second part will start on 25 July, and will be an exhibition of cleaned and collated rubbish materials.
As I began my shift, what struck me first was the smell of the gallery. It’s a sweet, fruity smell, not unlike over-ripe apples. It comes from the vast amount of sugary drinks and half eaten fruit thrown into the bins, the likely source being the hundreds of packed lunches eaten in the Museum every day. Throughout the Museum, the usual bins have been replaced with ‘General Waste’ and ‘Recycling’ bins. It soon became clear to me that in order to avoid the worst of the smell, the bags to pick out to sort through are the ones marked ‘Recycling’. This avoids the majority of the decomposing foodstuffs.
The task is to open up the bags, lay out the contents on a large white table, sort the contents as you see fit, and then snap a photo of the arranged items on an overhead camera. The opportunity to arrange the rubbish in whatever way you want has brought out the creativity of the volunteers. To this end, within a few days, a tumblr account was opened to show off some of the most imaginative of the layouts. Amongst my favourites are the seascape, composed of blue plastic bags and fruit, and blazing sun in the sky, made from bread sticks, paper towels and what looks like parsley. You can have a look here.
After half a dozen bags, a disheartening pattern starts to emerge. Much of what is being thrown away is perfectly good. Lots of the food is unopened or untouched. Leaflets and flyers are almost always pristine. It’s as though the bins are being used to de-clutter, rather than being a place to put things when they have reached the end of their useful lives. It seems inexplicable how many of the items have ended up in the bins. Three wheelchairs have been collected, over a dozen shoes, two fridges, a bra and a giant toothbrush.
Spurred by the some of the weird and wonderful items collected I have set myself a challenge. Like a Science Museum Womble, I aim to filter through the items left behind to put together some items that can be repurposed and redesigned to make a one-off product, that we can sell in the Museum shop. Watch this space…
Phase 2 – Sarah Harvey, Project Curator, The Rubbish Collection
After 30 frenzied days of documenting all the Science Museum waste, you might have expected artist Joshua Sofaer to take a well-earned break. No such luck. Since the documentation finished on 15 July, The Rubbish Collection has remained a hive of activity and an almost miraculous transformation has taken place. Gone are the sorting tables, bin bags and faint whiff of old packed lunch; in their place Joshua has created an intriguing and magical exhibition showcasing 30 days of Science Museum rubbish.
The exhibition is comprised of some of the bizarre and surprising items that were retained from the bins in the documentation phase of the project, displayed alongside almost 18 tonnes of materials processed and recycled from the Science Museum rubbish. Both the scale and the beauty of these materials and objects is quite unexpected, and I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so I’m just going to give you some teaser images (below). The exhibition opens to the public at 11am on Friday 25 July, so please come down and experience the wonder of ‘rubbish’ for yourself.
Phase 2 of Joshua Sofaer’s The Rubbish Collection opens at the Science Museum on 25 July and runs until 14 September 2014.