Invitation to a ‘Make-In’ – with waste plastic packaging
Run by ‘Beyond The Free Market’– a Critical Practice Chelsea project.

Wednesday 29th August

• 9 – 10.30 Plastics-collection at Nine Elms (optional but desirable MEET AT VAUXHALL BUS STATION, TUBE ENTRANCE)

• 10.30 – 4 at Chelsea College of Art, Millbank London – in the BTFM summer studio – room A319

This is an invitation to lend us your ingenuity and Blue-Peter level making skills to ‘perverse engineer’* a range of objects to raise funds for BTFM. Participants agree that all work produced will be subject to a Creative Commons ‘2.5’ licence (see below for details).

PVC drinks bottles, often highly colourful, polystyrene crates for broccoli, polymer fruit punnets – shamefully destined for landfill, incineration, or energy intensive recycling – help us give these items an afterlife as useful, or perhaps aesthetic objects… As yet, plastic waste is one of the least ‘green’ forms of rubbish.

As you may know, ‘Beyond The Free Market’ (BTFM) is seeking to critique food production in the ‘free market’ which often leads to over-production, waste, excessive ‘food miles’ and, at the same time, food insufficiency in many parts of the world. Working with the wholesale fruit and veg market at New Covent Garden, Nine Elms, London, we have already used the waste food to supply the ‘Free Market Kitchen’ allowing anyone to cook and eat free food.

More recently, we have also started to work with the copious amounts of often, excessive plastic packaging related to the distribution of food that is all too visible at New Covent Garden. As an extension of this (to address our larger interest in food production in general) we have also incorporated supermarket packaging in this investigation.

Our aim is to use the plastic waste from both these markets to raise ‘start-up capital’ for BTFM’s critique of these very entities – so the object of critique becomes the means of critique… We plan to do this by turning the rubbish (some of it highly seductive) into things that we can sell at street-markets, boot-fairs and via the Critical Practice wiki.

Of course, we’re asking you to donate your time and inventiveness to a ‘commercial concern’ – but don’t forget that all our profits will be plied back into BTFM and that you are free to develop the work as you so wish, as provided for by the Creative Commons Licence 2.5.

Registration required:

Yes

Free:

Yes