2007waste
WASTE, 2007
installation in: Work to do! Or take up the challenge of more work to do? Self-Organisation in Precarious Working-Conditions, Shedhalle Zurich. Curated by Sønke Gau and Katharina Schlieben.
WASTE is a project within the framework of RELAX works on economic space, about which it is claimed that it no longer has any outer borders.
The WASTE Room
One part of WASTE Room was the publication of a small advertisement in the employment columns of the print media, with the message “Waste your time and visit the WASTE Room! Have we aroused your interest? Contact us or just drop in.” Due to a lack of funds the number of placed ads was limited. Another part of WASTEfulness (die Verschwendung, la dépense) is the WASTE Room. An empty room was built, with an inside and an outside. The WASTE Room takes up the ground plan of the Shedhalle with its exhibition space, including offices, cinema and storage room, but on a drastically reduced scale. A wooden frame hangs over the Room fitted with 40 light bulbs, all of which are lit. The Room is there to do nothing. Three of the WASTE Room’s outside walls were enhanced with blue-white ‚human resources‘ silk screens, a large-scale black and white chalk drawing, as well as poster diagrams.
I HAVE I AM. A self-evaluation
The I HAVE I AM diagrams are the result of self-evaluations done by exhibition visitors. For this, the I HAVE I AM questionnaire is laid out ready on a small table outside the WASTE Room. This question sheet gives visitors the chance to evaluate on a scale of 0 to 100 individual concepts of value for I HAVE items (dreams, visions, intuition, friends, time, money, lobby, enemies) and I AM descriptions (generous, partial, calculative, militant, plaintive, neutral, naïve, for abundance). The evaluations can be drawn either as numbers or as lines on the diagram. The I HAVE I AM questionnaire plays with the authoritative power usually accorded to statistical representations. For the I HAVE I AM diagram, the concepts of value are arranged in a circle so that they cannot be juxtaposed to one another (e.g. as a dualistic conceptual pair). In addition, it remains unclear if the evaluations entered here are precise or if they simply illustrate visual preferences. All of the 93 received forms, no matter if filled out completely or left incomplete, are posted as DinA3 prints on the rear wall of the WASTE Room.
The installation: Chipboards, roof battens, wooden frames and light garlands, black and white chalk, a table, a chair, a question form: I HAVE I AM, silk screens ‚human resources‘, DinA3 prints with I HAVE I AM diagrams, 1 sofa, fresh water daily. With the exception of the four light garlands, all of the reusable elements remained in the Shedhalle. The chipboards and battens were reused by the Shedhalle as fixtures in installations for subsequent exhibitions.
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