The project, initially called Recycled Beings, attempts to be a truthful overview of the reasons and consequences of unwanted relocations in European nations for creating from this a parallel with similar phenomena in South American cities.
The research aims to expose immigration and integration policies from the societies I have had the chance to interact with, for potentially questioning their effectiveness. Responding to that I found the hypothesis of Dan Mellamphy and Nandita Biswas Mellamphy’s paper about Walter Benjamin’s argument on the matter very accurate with the perspective of my starting questions.
”…the matter—the materials —of materialist historiography are the objects that have been forgotten and discarded by modern bourgeois commodity culture.[…]
The only ‘historical object’ is the one that has been thrown out, rejected, and exists as a fact (fait accompli) and hence in fact (factually) rather than ‘fact’ or ‘fait’ishly. Its status as ‘has-been’ affords it the possibility to speak something entirely new and novel…”
Stretching widely what Benjamin refers as historical object, allows me to suggest that human beings can also be considered objects for the tangibility of our existence. We could then advocate that to find a place where historical objects are needed for the building of new and novel societies by the acceptance of any new discarded of relocated being, would be a must.
My criticisms towards superficial integration processes, which tend to work more as statistics rather than dynamic tools of cultural merging in the search of integrated and peaceful societies, is what organically shaped a starting platform for my research. The project that started on 2009 in Gothenburg, Sweden, with a second stage in Barcelona, Spain, and a third participation in Esquel and Buenos Aires, Argentina, found its way back to Scandinavia on 2011, as part of the FAIR artist in residency organized by Fabrikken for Kunst og Design.
Recycled Beings, a project by Oscar Lara 