RAIR is an art + industry nonprofit that stages interventions in the Philadelphia area waste stream to creatively explore waste culture and promote dialogue about sustainability. Offering artists access to over 450 tons of trash per day through its flagship Residency Program, RAIR has been nested within Revolution Recovery’s 3.5-acre construction and demolition waste recycling facility in the Tacony neighborhood of Philadelphia since 2010.
In late 2016 Revolution Recovery purchased the adjacent 11-acre Superfund Site formerly called the Metal Bank. Pastoral in appearance, this parcel of land located on the Delaware River was once the site of a scrap metal and transformer salvage facility where for years soils and groundwater were contaminated through the release of residual oils and heavy metals, rendering the land unusable. Since its EPA designation as a Superfund site in the early 1980s, the land has undergone extensive remediation.
While to-date RAIR’s programming has emphasized the reuse of recycled material, with Revolution Recovery’s recent acquisition of the Metal Bank, RAIR is now poised to broaden its focus to encompass sustainable solutions more generally—championing not only the creative reuse of recycled materials, but also of remediated land.
We have received funding from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in support of a new project, A Site to be Seen: Concepts for and from the Superfund, which is designed to frame the varied ecological, artistic and social potentials of the Superfund site adjacent to RAIR. This expository project invites artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, as a Visioning Artist in Residence, to offer counsel to RAIR while we investigate the feasibility of an organizational transition onto the site. The project also funds an initiative that invites a group of interdisciplinary artists, curators and other practitioners, as ‘Site Respondents’, to produce printed ‘Site Responses’. Addressing concepts of remediation and sustainability inspired by the Metal Bank Superfund site at 7301 Milnor st, these newsprint Site Response broadsides will creatively explore our collective relationship to maintenance, preservation and remediation of contaminated land.
This website will be updated with content and resources the project produces, please check back to see more.
