Residency – June 6 > July 6, 2013
Exhibition – July 6 > July 27, 2013
There were two projects completed during the residency: Vestiges l & Vestiges ll
Vestiges l – Six clandestine waste dump sites on the Magdalene Islands were sorted and organized. Former and not-so-former methods of dealing with unwanted materials is (was) to find out-of-the-way places, gullies, dead end country roads, a body of water, to dump unwanted materials. Each of the six sites were organized. The disordered heaps of waste were sorted by material types: metal, plastic, construction wood, yard waste, recyclable material and rubbish. The materials were not removed. The triage of material remains on the sites. A video was created which remains a vestige of the acts performed.
Vestiges ll – The display of artifacts and data representing my consumption and the waste produced over a 22-day period was in the Colis suspect [1]. Intrigued by the similar environmental concerns of the Magdalen Islands to those described by Douglas Adams for the planet Bethselamin in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I used the following quote as a point of departure:
The fabulously beautiful planet Bethselamin (Magdalen Islands) is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion (fifty thousand) visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete while on the planet (Islands) is surgically removed from your body weight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt.
Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
[1] Colis suspect is a glass case curated by AdMare as an contemporary art exhibition space. Typically, the display case, located in the lobby of the Island airport, would have been used to promote local activities to visitors as they arrived to the Islands.