Building Trash City

Genevieve Louw

On Saturday the 1st of May, the Spier Contemporary was a little trashy (but this time in a good way) Four of my good buddies/colleagues and I decided to run a workshop at City Hall after collecting alot of tins, boxes, plastic bottles and basically whatever we could find and called it "Metropolis: Building the City". Willard and Juma who work with me brought a few kids from Kayelitsha to come join in the fun and also to make us feel weak next to their awesome skills in sculpture. Lots of people who came to see the exhibition spontaneously joined in too, and we had a good group of about thirty or so people just making something out of nothing. There was an amazing milk bottle tower, a few stadiums with soccer fields (of course), The Cardboard Coffee Shop ( complete with plastic ATM), A radio, a television, cool mixed media cars and helicopters, the Twin Towers also made an appearance with paper aeroplanes, a tower/ stage for the Black Bag Rockstar Man to perform on, and lots lots more cool and interesting happenings. There were people of all ages who ended up making something to make the city grow. The children enjoyed it and some were there with their moms and dads who also made junk art. The sad part was realising when it was time to break it all down and send it all to recycling. I would have loved it if it stayed up as part of the exhibition. I think it would have been the best work on the Spier Contemporary by far! (jokes)



In this pic to the left: the team from left to right: Juma, Nix, Me, Alex,Willard. We are planning to run lots more workshops and would love it if mixtape people want to join in for the fun and get people involved who don't always have an opportunity to make art. My email is genjlouw@gmail.com and if you want to join the next one, I'll post something on the blog in advance and drop me an email if you want to help out.