John Muse curatorial class

Students from John Muse’s course Theory and Practice of Exhibitions: Objects, Images, Texts, Events visited RAIR. They were joined by Robin Nagle, Anthropologist-in-Residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation since 2016. They explored the site and learned about the waste stream and the residency program. They were tasked with creating an exhibition using materials gleaned by RAIR Director Billy Dufala and other artists over many years — materials deemed unprofitable by Revolution Recovery to sell for recycling. The materials included broken furniture; dirt, ash, and other unidentifiable debris; and objects that spoke of lives lived: from love letters and photographs to carefully preserved Playboy magazines, from folding knives to hundreds of multicolored hair curlers, from caches of costume jewelry to high school yearbooks.

ANTHONY GRAESCH

Dr. Anthony Graesch, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Connecticut College, traveled to Revolution Recovery’s Allentown recycling center with nine students from his environmental studies seminar Discard(-ers)(-ing) (-ables). They furthered a research project exploring Americans’ domestic material culture while addressing the fate of our possessions at the conclusion of our social lives. Over the course of five days, the team temporarily diverted, catalogued, and documented all of the objects that had been cleaned out of a home and were destined for a landfill.

ICE BOX CHALLENGE

Using the international traveling “Ice Box Challenge” as a model, the Passive House and Living Future Communities of Green Building United teamed up with RAIR to create their own Ice Box Challenge event, to learn together how to construct energy-efficient, comfortable, and healthy buildings on a small scale. RAIR hosted the event, and provided a selection of diverted material to use for construction. Teams designed and constructed Ice Boxes, filled them with ice, and waited to see how their box performed! While waiting for the final results, RAIR led a tour of the recycling facility and art studio to demonstrate other creative ways of thinking.

RAW ACADEMIE

Based in Dakar, Senegal, RAW Académie is a residential program for the research and study of artistic and curatorial practice and thought rooted in the question: “How do we learn from each other?” For the ninth session of its Académie, RAW relocated its staff and organization to Philadelphia for an experiment in institutional exchange, alternative pedagogy, and hospitality. The session, titled Infrastructure, was directed by artist, curator, activist, and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant.