Wasteland in Porto

Wasteland is a collaborative project that I did with MAFA classmates Lelia, Puipui, Rita, Yaoyao and Xiaojing. Primarily we started as an offsite show collaboration, to make a show that introduce an immersive artworks-interfusing scene: an installation that can see both as a whole or individuals. With this experience of making scene installation, we established a style of working and improvising, after that we tried to apply for more opportunities and we were lucky and agreed to do two more shows to explore and develop more as a collective of artists.

With the help of Rita, we were lucky to have the opportunity to exhibit inside a mall (Centro Comercial de Cedofeita) in Porto, Portugal in the early September. It was an big exhibition with multiple artists and each of the artists/ collectives can show in one of the shops inside the mall; the room we exhibited in was a large with a whole wall of glass window, which was a vibrant space for us to show with our scene installation.

After discussions of new work’s concept, we agreed to create a fish tank with the use of recycling materials to establish a direction towards the environment issues.

When we arrived in Porto, we first visited the place and started to improvise detailed ideas for our work. As reference and research we watched a documentary about the ocean and the problem of coral bleaching caught our attentions: global warming, water pollutions and other problems caused expulsion of algae which then the whitening of coral. With this idea we decided to fill the exhibition space with white coral, and material-wise we went to various local stores and supermarkets for recycling materials: cardboards, plastic wrappings, papers……

Within four days we were able to fill the whole room with different designs of corals and created a scene of ocean world. The installation was quite a successful one because with all the elements cooperated quite well together: corals, lighting, fish net, rubbish, etc.