LOVE Courtyard

“We love trash.” Basurama, an artist collective from Spain, asks us to radically reconsider what trash is.

As we create three times the annual waste as we did in the 1960’s, how can we move away from a culture of disposability? Utilizing materials drawn from the waste stream, Basurama and community collaborators designed and constructed an attractive and inviting outdoor space of planters and seating made from re-purposed school desks. The inter-continental planning process was facilitated by artistic team leaders Gamar Markarian and Mateo Fernández-Muro. A series of mini-murals, painted in the gathering space and in the school yard by James Dunn and local youth, are inspired by one of the project themes “sharing culture”. These works are part of a larger community vision for “Our Park,” a transformation of the entire Southwark School site, originally scheduled for completion by 2020.

Working with Basurama is an important link in the continuum of the project in which we seek to create structures and processes for planning that “breaks divisions” and “builds a sense of shared community and collective neighborhood assets”. As they state “we find gaps in these processes of production and consumption that not only raise questions about the way we manage our resources but also about the way we think, we work, we perceive reality,” and they join people together through the process.