For over a decade, visual artist and environmental activist Ann Wizer has been collecting Asia’s trash and turning it into art. Her latest ventures—the XSProject and the Invisible Institute—put Filipinos and Indonesians to work as they transform environmental waste into marketable accessories.

The climes, they are a-changing. In our post-consumer society, sustainability is the new black, and green is the new white—many products of dubious ecological provenance get greenwashed with a patina of earth-friendliness to lure the mildly concerned shopper. Filipinos, however, have been into the lifestyle way before Heidi Klum de-hippified the Birkenstock. Sustainable diapers? We reuse rags. Sustainable cleaning products? Break out the coconut shell. Sustainable transportation? Wooden scooters will get you there! The marketplace is a limitless area where the war against climate change is being waged, and ironically we are encouraged to buy more products, albeit better ones, like organic bamboo sweatshirts and electric cars, to combat the problem created by excessive consumerism in the first place. When we get swept away in the torrent of overriding information and contradictory messages, we need to look to art to reach some kind of critical distance, to find a lens through which to assess the world. Art is charged with the noble duty to question and challenge, and artists have the responsibility to make the statements that need to be made. But what if art can become a transformative process that comments and contributes at the same time?

Wizer sees the work-in-progress crocheted quilt as a trampoline that lifts the women up; I see it also as a flag that they can raise against poverty, against the tiny percentage of the world who use up the majority of its resources, against invisibility and the act of not seeing. 

Ann Wizer walks through the corroded landscape of landfills and sees a palimpsest of the global economy. Trash is impervious to shifts in modes of production and the virtualization of currency—trash collects, grows, accumulates, and evolves into a built environment of its own. Wizer, a visual artist/environmental activist, has been living in Asia since the early 90s, using found objects from nature and industry in her works. She eventually came to use just garbage in her creations, because “there is so much of it.” In Jakarta, she collaborated with the trash-pickers, a sort of caste of untouchables who survive solely on scavenging. She paid them to wash, dry, clean, and cut up garbage, and taught them how to work the materials into shoulder bags and other saleable products in a venture called XSProject.

In a recent exhibit at the Galleria Duemila in Pasay City, Wizer mounted refuse-upholstered furniture pieces with exaggerated proportions, an indictment on corporate social irresponsibility, where companies and governments refuse to deal with the waste they lay. Stuffed with colorful, shiny strips of plastic from toothpaste tubes and other discards and cut entirely by scissor, the chairs contain the shredded and damning evidence of a profligate corporate culture.

It makes you think twice about picking up a Zesto—juice packaging, made from layers of metal, paper and plastic, is unrecyclable. Inevitably, the very same companies who denied Wizer any help when she was developing the project turned around and reappropriated the ideas, and used recycled bags as corporate giveaways. “They seem to see XSProject concepts only as promotional devices to increase their sales,” Wizer says. As for the chairs, they were especially made for these execs “who have built their brands, made their profits but due to selfish neglect of a larger world, they sit in their own waste. They’ve soiled their nests.”

In the adjacent room, Wizer displays the results of a sustainable cooperative she recently established in Manila. An offshoot of the XSProject, the Invisible Institute uses the strangely innate skill of crocheting among Filipina women (even I have turned out a few beer cozies once in my life) and develops it to produce bags, baskets, hammocks, slippers, and anything else that can be crocheted from plastic bags, factory scraps, and yes, even computer wires. The center attraction is the large spider web tent that was still being weaved at the edges by two women from the community. Clutching a skein of plastic-bag yarn and a crochet hook, they added links and chains, loops and knots, growing a little patch of their own in this rhizomatic mapping of salvaged territories. Embedded in the matrix are disposable lighters, CDs, circuit boards, and other detritus of our throwaway culture. With this new/old craft, the unseen and ignored community of urban poor mothers and grandmothers are given tools with which they can earn a living, and they in turn train other women in the arts of turning trash into flash. The concept is neither new nor revolutionary, but its simplicity is what makes it all the more powerful. Wizer sees the work-in-progress crocheted quilt as a trampoline that lifts the women up; I see it also as a flag that they can raise against poverty, against the tiny percentage of the world who use up the majority of its resources, against invisibility and the act of not seeing.

“Every single thing we use, from a ballpoint pen to the most complex computer is designed. Hence, waste is a design flow,” states Wizer. The dump is indeed designed into products; it is their final destination. Planned obsolescence has been an open secret among industrial designers even since the 1950s, and as I write this very sentence on my perfectly functional and faithful MacBook, I am already adulterously lusting for the sexy new ones that Jobs recently rolled out, mentally condemning my present one to the technological purgatory where chunky beige components and pre-WiFi laptops go to short circuit. (As a slightly related side note, I have somehow owned all versions of Mac laptops starting from the PowerBook G3. I would have a veritable museum of Apple computers by now—a Macsoleum, if each had not all conked out in one way or another—now what does that say about the power of planned and perceived obsolescence?)

So yes, I am contributing to the great toxic landfill in the sky, but until there are responsible methods for techno trash disposal, we at least know that when we buy a Tetra-Pak tote, a chandelier constructed out of water bottle parts, or the latest fashions woven from Ethernet cables, we are reclaiming some of what we have put out in the world, and are taking responsibility for a system that perpetuates more inequality as it produces more unnecessary things. Most of all, we reverse the design flow and reintegrate people into the equation. Now if we can only recycle into art all the incalculable garbage online—spam, hate blogs, spurious Wikipedia entries, and Facebook pictures you can untag but can’t make disappear—we can clean up our mental environment as well.