start

My introduction to the practice of New Earth started outside in the botanical garden Arboretum Trompenburg, where we got to discuss our previous knowledge of the New Earth themes, getting to research the surrounding fungi as well as getting an introduction to the next assignment.
In the early interdisciplinary duo's assignment, we decided to present Ecosia, a search engine charity whose website uses the profit it makes from the searches to plant trees in areas in the world it is needed the most. After looking through various classmates' analogue presentations, I was drawn to Recycling as a theme.

Furthermore, our new newly-formed group set out to find various initiatives that were recycle based, we were drawn to Scrap XL (Stichting CReatief hergebruik Afval Producten), which focuses on selling materials gathered from companies giving away things they do not need, giving waste material a new chance. As a large team of animation students, we as a group had all a lot of history using Scrap in the past and we were also intrigued after finding out they were actively organizing study days and workshops, that we thought in one way we could collaborate with them.

We got some feedback where we were encouraged to write down our personal connections to recycling, to get a better idea of why we went this route with the project. I personally am interested in recycling as I find it very valuable on an environmental basis, but I also like the mindset of recycling as I think it invites a lot of unexpected and unconventional approaches: whether it is to fashion findings or producing new material things and art.

Through my group's discussions, our project theme became based on changing the mindset of artists, as our target group. More specifically, we wanted to encourage environmentally conciousious habits, and instead of “desire for the new”, we would encourage “passion for the used”. A concept of the idea was to organize a workshop collaboration with Scrap with the “anything can be an art brush” mentality, where we would paint with non-traditional artist supplies such as old things that would normally be viewed as trash, which was also an idea very inspiring for myself personally as an artist.

Furthermore, we contacted Scrap through email and visited their organization to have conversations with the employees on multiple occasions. We had some conversations about their supply and relation to material making and what we found, is that our collaboration did not go as planned as our idea of a workshop collaboration did not get a response.

However, we found an unexpected path for our idea after some interesting information we found from our latest conversation was how Scrap has to move since the government is planning on building expensive apartment complexes on their location. Scrap has also had a cycle of continuously being pushed out of the city center due to rising high prices of rent, and how this is also a problem for a lot of artists and small businesses in Rotterdam. We thought this was an interesting idea to follow for our project, and decided to a shift of theme to gentrification.

This issue relates to the communing of the ground and having an area going from an area of the commons, to becoming privatized and state-controlled. This is an interesting parallel to what happened in the area of ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes, when activists, farmers, boat builders, etc. protected their land through protesting by constructing a lighthouse where the French government had planned to put a control tower for a new airport. Likewise, one can see similar ongoing protests in Rotterdam, such as activism towards Saving the Museumpark, where a large urban community of skaters are losing their central skating spot due to the government wanting to replace it with natural stone concrete.

Our content now, was to in a workshop setting make a collaborative art piece of a map of Rotterdam. As mentioned in the article Scene Seen: Alternative Cartographies @ McDaniel College by Rebecca Juliette, “Cartography, or mapmaking, is an act of power” I was very inspired by the idea to use alternative cartography to showcase the problem of gentrification in Rotterdam. Consequently, we printed a large map of Rotterdam where we invited all artists from our academy to add their monthly rent and place it where they live. After this, as opposed to looking at just a normal map of Rotterdam, we got a very real, realistic reference to how insupportable it can be for many artists to live in the city.

As the artists/workshop attendees could see this as a reference, we invited them to “reclaim” the city as artists by scrapping a second map, a model of Rotterdam we had made together with old white Styrofoam. We did not want to abandon our theme of recycling and previous workshop idea, so the scraps that were used to pimp up the city were taken from Scrap, the Trashbunker of Willem de Kooning, and old scraps we had laying around in our house that was not in use.

The end piece was an artistic statement of artists reclaiming the city, in support of Scrap and people in similar situations. Still, we are currently looking into bringing this piece further back to scrap or continuing advertising for it.
Conclusively, to comment on the collaborations of our group, I think our own organization worked well with our weekly meetings and discussions, and also that we managed to find a new path in our project when our initial idea based of our own inspiration did not completely work out. I think its really interesting to see the evolution of our idea on a timeline basis and the connection between gentrification and recycling.
Looking back on the whole practice of New Earth as a whole, I feel like I learned a lot not only about recycling alone, but how to tie it to an artist's perspective, and I feel inspired to tie this mindset to my own major in future projects I will make. Furthermore, learning about commons in general and gentrification has been very meaningful.

References
ZAD protest:
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/124/446244/flourishing/
Save Museumpark:
https://www.rijnmond.nl/nieuws/1128773/actiegroep-save-museumpark-wil-skatespot-redden-voor-urban-sports
Alternate cartographies:
https://bmoreart.com/2015/12/scene-seen-alternative-cartographies-mcdaniel-college.html

Scrap Website:
https://www.scrapxl.nl/
Ecosia Website:
https://www.ecosia.org/