UNDER the auspices of the Spanish Embassy and Instituto Cervantes, along with SM Supermalls, the TrashLation exhibit was recently launched by the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde and the Spanish collective Basurama.
TrashLation features a world-wide visual representation of the trash that each of us produces regardless of our social status, country of origin, or age. It invites the public to reflect on frenetic consumption and the amount of garbage that a consumer produces in a matter of 24 hours. The exhibition, likewise, manages to display how the local and international are closely connected.
The exhibit shows, in some way, the connection between consumption and need, differentiating between consumption and consumerism.
The project is not a sociological survey, but instead, looks into individual waste and its close relationship with identity of the participants from all over the world that have been part of the project.
Since 2014, Basurama, an organization founded in 2001 devoting itself to research, creative and cultural production, as well as the environment, has carried out this research at an international level and has photographed different people alongside their inorganic wastes that they have produced in a single day.
So far, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Hungary, India, Japan, Morocco, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain and Sweden have participated in the project.
This year TrashLation puts on a Filipino face with the participation of the faculty and staff of the De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, demonstrating the dynamic and all-encompassing nature of this international project.
Basurama has focused its area of research and action on production processes, the wastes that they entail and future creative prospects that these contemporary circumstances provoke. It has set its mind to find wastes where they would not be so easy to come upon and study garbage in all its forms.
This project is not about a comparison between the excessive, but acceptable, consumption in the West and the growing and peculiar consumption in the East, but is a narrative of how the participants have plunged into their inorganic garbage, choosing what best represents them to show their way of life, their buying power, their taste as social distinction and their whims, secrets or vices.
The truth is that all of them filter what to show, not what really honestly defines them, but what they want to be associated with.
TrashLation, which will run until July 30, is based on that tension between the public and private sides of an individual, creating more than just a picture but a panorama of our lives in these times.