Bin Collaging
Age Groups: 5+
No. Staff per children necessary: 1 adult per 10 children
Approximated time: Minimum 30 minutes: 10 minute briefing, 10–30 minute task, 10+ minute discussion.
Required Materials: Staplers, glue sticks, tape.
Overview:
Through this workshop, students will be encouraged to think of themselves in terms of the waste they produce. Not only does this directly engage students with their environmental footprint but allows them to critique without alienation or shame for what said footprint looks like.
This workshop will engage with themes of post-humanism and identity, and consumer culture. These complex topics will be engaged with playfully, in a workshop accessible to all audiences, rather than through alienating academic texts or lectures.
Workshop Plan:
The workshop will begin by briefly discussing ‘identity’, asking students what they understand by the term, and how they describe their own ‘identity’, through words, art, things, etc. The task will then be pitched; students will be encouraged to make a simple collage of what they have/would throw away. This compilation of rubbish is unique for each person, with different habits of consuming, and disposing. By collaging this residue together, we are making a map of ourselves in terms of our impact on the planet. This is a self-portrait; a mirror.
The task will then begin. Each student will be equipped with a stapler, and a roll of tape, and will be asked to use their rubbish to make one of these identity collages. This task is even more beneficial as a homework task, as their access to their personal rubbish is more plentiful. The collage should be between A5 and A4, with as much detail and creativity within it as the student desires.
Once the creative task is completed, students will showcase their collages, and discuss 3 things that they feel directly links the collage to them personally. Similarities and differences between everyone’s work will be discussed, outlining individual, and communal habits of consumption and disposal.
Finally, students will be asked if their perception of/relationship to rubbish has changed at all by doing this task, facilitating engaging a discussion around disposal culture, and our responsibility for the rubbish we produce.
Intended Impact:
Through observing rubbish through a drastically different lens; looking at it as an extension/reflection of the self, students will hopefully engage with the idea of their ‘self’ extending far beyond their skin. As agents in this damaged landscape, we have affect, and thus power in our environment, because it is us, and we are it. This body fluidity can be hard to grasp, though engaging with it physically will draw students closer to feeling their extended ecology, even though it may be hard to describe with words. Rubbish is our most plentiful transitional state between being as flesh humans and being in planetary rock. It is where our decisions start to affect geology, a connection between our self-hood as an agent/individual and as a part of an entire planetary system, and planet. This radical way of thinking is always uncertain, confused, incommunicable through words, and the workshop does not aim to communicate this concept fully, but to push students towards thinking in this direction.
Supporting Texts: Hyperobjects, System of Objects, The Second Body, We Belong to Gaia, All Art is Ecological.
No. Staff per children necessary: 1 adult per 10 children
Approximated time: Minimum 30 minutes: 10 minute briefing, 10–30 minute task, 10+ minute discussion.
Required Materials: Staplers, glue sticks, tape.
Overview:
Through this workshop, students will be encouraged to think of themselves in terms of the waste they produce. Not only does this directly engage students with their environmental footprint but allows them to critique without alienation or shame for what said footprint looks like.
This workshop will engage with themes of post-humanism and identity, and consumer culture. These complex topics will be engaged with playfully, in a workshop accessible to all audiences, rather than through alienating academic texts or lectures.
Workshop Plan:
The workshop will begin by briefly discussing ‘identity’, asking students what they understand by the term, and how they describe their own ‘identity’, through words, art, things, etc. The task will then be pitched; students will be encouraged to make a simple collage of what they have/would throw away. This compilation of rubbish is unique for each person, with different habits of consuming, and disposing. By collaging this residue together, we are making a map of ourselves in terms of our impact on the planet. This is a self-portrait; a mirror.
The task will then begin. Each student will be equipped with a stapler, and a roll of tape, and will be asked to use their rubbish to make one of these identity collages. This task is even more beneficial as a homework task, as their access to their personal rubbish is more plentiful. The collage should be between A5 and A4, with as much detail and creativity within it as the student desires.
Once the creative task is completed, students will showcase their collages, and discuss 3 things that they feel directly links the collage to them personally. Similarities and differences between everyone’s work will be discussed, outlining individual, and communal habits of consumption and disposal.
Finally, students will be asked if their perception of/relationship to rubbish has changed at all by doing this task, facilitating engaging a discussion around disposal culture, and our responsibility for the rubbish we produce.
Intended Impact:
Through observing rubbish through a drastically different lens; looking at it as an extension/reflection of the self, students will hopefully engage with the idea of their ‘self’ extending far beyond their skin. As agents in this damaged landscape, we have affect, and thus power in our environment, because it is us, and we are it. This body fluidity can be hard to grasp, though engaging with it physically will draw students closer to feeling their extended ecology, even though it may be hard to describe with words. Rubbish is our most plentiful transitional state between being as flesh humans and being in planetary rock. It is where our decisions start to affect geology, a connection between our self-hood as an agent/individual and as a part of an entire planetary system, and planet. This radical way of thinking is always uncertain, confused, incommunicable through words, and the workshop does not aim to communicate this concept fully, but to push students towards thinking in this direction.
Supporting Texts: Hyperobjects, System of Objects, The Second Body, We Belong to Gaia, All Art is Ecological.