IT IS: to gather together people with a mutual fascination in trash, refuse, garbage, landfill, recycling, waste etc, in our present past and future, with special attention to new york city. To learn history towards building the future. To find delight and pleasure despite peril. To wade through nanoplastic and black mayonnaise together. To share knowledge and offer new paths. To make a less bad future???
IT IS NOT: to be crushingly doomsday, thereby refusing and denying a present and future. To spout critically terrifying facts that destabilize and paralyze rather than generate ideas and movement.
LOWKEY ALSO: To play outside. To meet cute smart people. To inform our own projects. To have an excuse to contact scientists and facilities and institutions. To get grants…? To be together, learn things, and make art (and maybe even science?)
Trash Club is an ongoing community art project that unearths the buried systems and stories of waste in NYC through collective project-making, citizen science, deep attention, and poetic research. Our goal is to change mindsets about waste, overcoming isolation and apathy by creating in-person gatherings and hands-on workshops. Our collective formed in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a neighborhood plagued by years of ecological disaster, increasingly masked by luxury real estate development. We study the ignored debris and liminal seams of rapidly gentrifying urban landscapes. We created Trash Club as an absurdist vessel for serious work. Our workshops have included live-drawing trash walks, e-waste dissection, scrap swaps, and film screenings. We are experimental. We are cultivating the endurance required of both artmaking and activism by approaching serious subjects with humor. We exile doom and welcome joy. We are Trash Club.