Recycling Objects

Everyday objects made from already used materials (such as oil cans, rubber tires, coke bottles, clothing, etc.) were shown in the Recycling Objects exhibition. The exhibition contained 151 objects - mostly everyday objects (toys, oil lamps, jugs, suitcases, etc.). These came from Kenya, Mali, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Togo, Tanzania, Morocco, Namibia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Jordan, Singapore, Zanzibar, Burkina Faso, India, Eritrea, Nigeria and Sudan. The exhibits were on loan from the Übersee-Museum Bremen, the Jürgen Grothues Collection, the Gert Chesi Collection and loans from private individuals.

Such items can now be purchased in many shops, and in 1995 they were still largely unknown in Europe. This exhibition therefore received a great deal of media attention at the time, and the gallery was able to register over 600 visitors.

According to Jürgen Grothues, recycling is "an important development in Third World material culture, but it is by no means a regional or ethnic specificity"; millions of people around the world make their living from products from the recycling trade. The exhibits were not understood as works of art or ethnological evidence, but as cultural fragments they told of the means of production, access to materials and old/raw materials of the First World - a world that in turn was reflected in the objects. The exhibition tried to show the variety of possibilities of reusing 'waste products' and to make the extended cycle of raw materials visible through multiple transformation.

On May 26, 1995, Ursula Schöll spoke about her experiences in setting up and managing feeding centers in Sudan. Ursula Schöll has been working in crisis regions in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe since 1985. Clearly distanced from touristic-exotic perspectives (one could describe attempts at distancing as a central motif of the Recycling Objects exhibition), the report illustrated the possibility of a problem-conscious and constructive encounter with other people and cultural forms.

On June 2, 1995, Dr. Jürgen Grothues the lecture recycling trade. The freelance ethnologist specializing in economic ethnology and cultural change described recycling in the Third World as a survival and life strategy with entirely positive approaches to the development of new trades and additional earning opportunities within the framework of self-help efforts. He did not primarily point to the misery, but to the practice of overcoming difficulties, to the ingenuity with which this is accomplished, to imagination and personal initiative.

The creator of the exhibition, the video artist Romana Scheffknecht, was responsible for the exhibition architecture and was also represented with two video works herself, very reservedly with two small television sets on the floor. On the one hand she showed the documentation of a trip through Sri Lanka (1993) that she had made with the artist Fritz Grohs, and on the other hand a film report on a trip to India (1987) undertaken together with the media artist Karel Dudesek.

text: Andrea Hörl

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