Escombros Vivos (Live Debris)
Taylor Cass Stevenson
Portland,
OR and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
$5,000
Another of our 2009 Grants-to-Artists recipients, Escombros Vivos is a traveling series of events and installations dedicated to sharing and establishing new reuse traditions in Portland, Oregon and Rio de Janeiro. In exchanging practices that promote experimentation with reused materials, the project ultimately aims to dissolve stigmas both against garbage and the people who live and work in our garbage, presenting creative reuse as a means of also reintegrating excluded communities.
Escombros Vivos works in collaboration with local artists, reuse groups and homeless and low income communities in Portland and Rio to demonstrate international reuse techniques and practices through free workshops, materials exchange parties, trash-based public installations and exhibitions of collaborative art engaging all walks of life.
The exhibitions include works of reuse art and design that were started in the green city of Portland, Oregon and taken to Rio de Janeiro, where Brazilian artists are physically and philosophically modifying the works to express their more polemic and necessity-based attitudes towards humanity’s discards. The finished collaborative works will then return to Portland Oregon for a final event demonstrating innovative Brazilian reuse techniques to Portlanders.