TrashLation
Educational Social Media
TrashLation is a participatory artistic project about trash, about consumption, about identity and about social patterns worldwide. Which main objective is to make awareness and promote environmental education trough action, as we belive your own experience is best way to engangepeople. The purpose of the project is to visualize at world level, how much waste and what tipe of waste each of us produce daily, regardless our social class, country of origin or age. Trashlation aim to display in images how local and global are closely related; visualize trough our daily consumption also who markets have become global and to reflect on our production and consumption patterns as a society. We are what we trough away, our trash speaks a lot about us as individuals an as a society. This projects show our B side, what we usually hide, our rubbish. Putting all this pictures together we do not pretend to compare occidental excessive/acceptable consumption with the increasing consumption on the global south. Trashlation displays how each participant plunges into their own inorganic trash and select what they believe that represents them better: their life style, their social status, their “taste” as social distinction, their whims, secrets and vices. The truth is that we all make use of a sort of filter when choosing not what really shows who we are but what we want people to identify us with. When choosing our trash we are making a self-portrait of consumption-identity, the most public side and at the same time the most intimate of ourselves. In this tension we situate Trashlation, generating a landscape of our daily life. We did design instructions so everyone could be part of the project and send us their picture to upload them to the web. But we want to design specific instructions that could be use on schools, more understandable for kids and Instructions: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r0t91zu6ekz3ge3/InstruccionesTrashlation_.pdf?dl=0 Repository of photos: https://trashlation.tumblr.com/ These following countries have taken part in TrashLation so far: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Hungary, India, Japan, Morocco, Mexico, Norway, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan. When researching on the relation consumption-identity, evidences and topics raise up, but we also discover surprising correlations among global trash and people. TrashLation follows the trail of concepts and meanings related to consumption and need, consumption and desire, consumption as memory, citizens as consumers, differences between consumption and consumerism…far from being a sociology or survey pretension, it nourishes from the global and collective imaginary and the trash of people, therefore their intimacy taking part in the project.