Ideenstudio

Privileged Tactics, 2

/ Idee: Sara Heitlinger & Franc Purg /

Background:
In the Egyptian capital of Cairo, 40,000 Coptic Christians live in the neighborhood of Moqqatam. These people, called Zabbaleen (meaning Rubbish Collectors), survive by collecting one third of the city’s garbage. In family-run cottage industries they sort through the rubbish and manage to recycle around 85% of what they collect. (To compare, Britain currently recycles only 2-3% of its household waste). There are 70,000 Zabbaleen living in seven different settlements in Cairo, helping to deal with solid-waste disposal in this rapidly expanding city. Despite international recognition for their low-impact and low-energy recycling techniques, their livelihood is under threat by both international garbage contractors and government plans to move the Zabbaleen out of the city. The international sanitation companies crush the garbage after collection, making it impossible to recycle, and then dump it in land-fill sites.

Project Description:
Our project uses GPS technology and video documentary to show the ingenuity of this ‘outsider’ community and its solution for sustainability in a metropolis such as Cairo, which has a population of around 17 million.

The project has two elements:

1) Firstly, we will attach 1000 tiny GPS devices to 1000 plastic drinking bottles in shops in Cairo. By following the journeys of the bottles, as they are bought, consumed, discarded, collected by waste disposal agents, and disposed of, we will create a map which indicates where these bottles end up. Thus we will see how many finish their journey in land-fill sites and how many the Coptics’ settlements.

2) Secondly, through video documentary we will tell the intimate story of one plastic bottle that ends up in Moqqatam. We will watch it proceed through all the stages of recycling (sorting, cutting, washing, drying), its being repackaged and sold, and its evolution into a new product or object.

By focusing both on a large number of bottles, as well as on the story of an individual plastic bottle, we will be simultaneously telling the story of the Coptic community and its struggle for survival against the government and international garbage-disposal companies, as well as illuminating a sustainable solution for the accumulating waste of big-cities such as Cairo.

Privileged Tactics 2 follows on from Privileged Tactics 1, our project about children living on the streets in Ukraine, which is now being exhibited at the 5th Triennial of Contemporary Slovenian Art in the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana.

Downloads:
Kurzfilm Privileged Tactics, 2 Größe:4.78 MB

Über Sara Heitlinger & Franc Purg

Austellungen von Sara Heitlinger & Franc Purg