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NADYA SAYAPINA

TRASH ART CACHE

(Minsk, Belarus)

 

For the right people, trash bins often turn out to be a real “treasure trove.” For underground cultural figures, they are a site for critique; for hunters of second-hand treasure, they are a cache of valuables unwittingly consigned by previous owners to the dump. During the pandemic, these treasure troves also became a site of meaningful quotidian ritual as one of the few offline common areas still available for use, a kind of public space.

Trash Art Cache, which takes the form of QR codes posted on trash bins around various parts of the city, is an experiment in creating a cultural communications space in a surprising and easily accessible place. Its format lets people discover treasure without difficult maps, guidebooks, or passwords, and “meet with” beloved actors and events on the Belarusian art scene. Bringing together six contemporary Belarusian art projects that deal with trash, Trash Art Cache both problematizes uninformed viewers’ typical interpretation of Belarusian contemporary art as “trash” and also raises the question of how said art is documented and archived online, eventually becoming a data cache, an online chaos of handy links, internet trash.

Participant artists include: Bazinto, Ruslan Vaskeivich, Polythony, Andrei Dureiko, Maksim Osipov and anonymous statements in the urban environment.

Website of the project: http://sayart.me/trashartcache

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