Garbage Pin

Garbage Pin is a device jewel born from a distinctly urban concept of appropriation and reinterpretation of a daily use object: the rubbish bin.

Being of a kind of urban furnishing that exists in big numbers in the cosmopolitan set-up, the waste bin belongs with no doubt to the collective imagery, present in the day to day of any citizen as a reflection of a culture linked to an accelerated and increasing consumption like is ours.

The piece is presented as a pin (4,5 x 2 x 3 cm) with a metallic structure where a little transparent plastic bag is fitted, complemented with a kit of refills to replace the bags once the jewel is used, allowing to keep the different results obtained. Silver: as a noble and valuable material, natural and recyclable resource, is here faced with plastic: ordinary and cheap material, of synthetic origin, highly responsible for the destruction of our eco-system.

Usually we throw away all that we do not want; all that we consider waste in our lives. Like so, with the Garbage Pin, we can proceed with a similar process to the one we follow with ordinary dustbins. However,the piece can also be understood as a reliquary, where everybody can keep small symbolic memories of the day to day, small nothings that remind of big moments. On the other hand, Garbage Pin can be understood as the means to a liberating catharsis of our interior rubbish or even, live it and use it as a critic vehicle, denouncing the problems of the current urban society. In summary, there isn’t a guide of predetermined procedures or instructions for the use of Garbage Pin, everybody can select their own personal rubbish and is responsible for it. In this sense, bags being transparent promote a critical self-denounce that reveals what is ordinarily hidden.

Garbage Pin Project started in January 2008 as a virtual process through the communication established with the 90 artists that have participated. All of them were sent the Garbage Pin kit with which a common proposal could be carried out.The proposal consisted in suggesting to them to use the jewel during five days and to select, create or recreate, the contents kept in five plastic bags according to the perspective and reflections generated from the project: ‘worth VS waste’ in the current urban society.In August 2008 each artist returned its concluding proposal, gathering this way a considerable corpus of rubbish bags.

Besides the jewel being itself a place – such as a painting, a sculpture or an installation –, it presents the particularity of inhabiting a mobile place: the body.The body is its place of support; its place of communication that, at the same time, carries it to different places. In this sense, the jewel can be understood as a place of dialectic between the intimate sphere and the public sphere since whoever carries it comes from his private space showing himself with the jewel in the public space. This mobility confers the jewel with a privileged character as social communicator that, on one hand, can be
presented as a symbol of belonging or identification with a determined group or social class.

Garbage Pin Project is materialised in installation format gathering a corpus of 440 elements and will be shown internationally as of April 2009 in an itinerant exhibition.

Text by curator of exhibition Ana Cardim