ESCOMBRARTE: Recycled Trash Artworks

ESCOMBRARTE EXHIBITION
19th April – 16th June 2018

It is worth paying a visit to IE Creativity Center Casa de la Moneda –Edificio Cultural- to see the last and finest selection of artifacts that recover waste unusable, to reuse surprisingly and transform them into works with a certain artistic pretension.
The waste, coming from diverse demolitions are reminiscent of memories, of "past stories", and allow to develop a certain creativity and share emotions, thus giving a second chance of new creative value to materials that we often discard and destroy.

Abandoned materials that we rediscover again, daring to look for a new meaning in them. We decontextualize and deconstruct them from their original meaning, we dare to accept them with a courageous and daring rereading, enlightening as such with a new presence and identity.

In these six editions of Escombrarte -the Competition- 139 artists have participated, presenting a total of 210 works. In each edition, an important group of artists participate, for whom recycling is their natural way of working, for which many of them repeat in the consecutive editions presenting their new works. Others, however, have just discovered the surprising possibilities of materials that until recently lacked all attractiveness and interest and are entertained with a suggestive exercise between fascination and craftsmanship, achieving personal satisfaction as much unexpected and successful discovery.

The predominant nationality of all of them is Spanish but there have also been artists from Portugal, Cuba, Uruguay, Colombia, Argentina, Japan ... As for the national sculptors, the largest participation corresponds to Castilla y León, although in different editions also Madrid, Cantabria, Catalonia, Valencia, Extremadura, Galicia, the Basque Country and the Canary Islands have took part.

The variety and diversity of the materials used truly surprises, ranging from paper and cardboard to iron, from ceramic materials to concrete, from wood to stone, from synthetic materials to glass, as though artists reinforce their projects with explicit or unconscious references to great artists, movements and trends. The latter are part of collective memory -Expressionism and Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism- to endlessly tell us new stories with old materials, to share new stories re-pieced together from fragmented elements.
The most varied techniques such as forging, welding, burnishing, twisting, skating, couplings and intentional assemblies are used subtle or conscious, but this is always performed in complex and dynamic fashion. 

With greater or lesser fortune the projects are carried out with rigorous and intentional methodology. This is to say a demanding search for materials, discarding, selection, classification, distancing, vision and ideation, until the final execution for their proud presentation.

It is noteworthy that Escombrarte Project organizes each year this contest of recycled sculptures with which art and citizenship go hand in hand. It not only tries to work with recycled materials but these in addition rethink sustainability, environmental and ethical commitment. Each of the exposed works question the dominant life model: a society of abusive and foolish consumption that characterizes without appeals the current order of things. Is it not natural to accept that growth is unsustainable? In one way or another, art has never stopped expressing its critical vision of social conflicts in an increasingly uncertain world.

All in all, Escombrarte joins one of the most widespread artistic trends in contemporary art called ecological art, art of recycling, environmental art integrating values of sustainability and critical commitment to creativity. This final selection IE University is delighted to host deserves such initiative.

This is principal and primarily a private initiative by AR Los Huertos Recycling Center Segovia which ultimately calls for the VI International Sculpture Competition with Recycled Construction Materials.

Rodrigo González Martín
Translated by Javier Gómez Cabrera 

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Co-hosted with: IE Campus Life

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