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LIVE MUSIC, PRESENTATIONS, PANEL DISCUSSION, WORKSHOPS, GALLERY OPENING, PRIZES, SILENT AUCTION, DANCE PARTY

Join Only Green Design this March 8th and 9th to cultivate a positive and collaborative response to issues of pollution, community disintegration and lack of fresh engagement in design/build processes.

Upcycle Santa Fe will feature educational presentations to demonstrate some of the vast alternatives found in the creative reuse (upcycling) of wasted materials, and a panel discussion entitled Culture at the Crossroads.

Come make rehabilitation a celebration, participate in an open source exchange of knowledge and materials to empower at the grassroots level, and support Only Green Design’s Ecological Design Education projects.

March 8th, 5:30 – 8:00 pm – $10 – Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail

• 5:30 – 6:00 – Opening Reception with lite fare, libations, and live music from Matthew Andrae
• 6:00 – 6:15 – South African Trash to Treasure Festivals with Joseph Stodgel
• 6:15 – 6:30 – ·Only Green Design· in Kosovo with James Stodgel
• 6:30 – 7:00 – Alexi Dzurec of Autotroph Design – International Relevance to Local Design Applications
• 7:00 – 8:00 – Axle Contemporary’s Mobile Gallery N(o)stalgia Opening in front of CCA
• 7:30 – 8:00 – Live Music with Alamo Sun

March 9th, 10am – 5pm – Warehouse 21, 1614 Paseo De Peralta

• UPCYCLE OGD Shipping Pallet Art Installation!
• 10:00 – 10:30am – Morning Presentations by James and Joseph Stodgel
• 10:30am – 12:00pm – Panel Discussion – Culture at the Crossroads of Art, Design, and Agriculture with Brian Skeele of Sustainable Santa Fe, designer Alexi Dzurec of Autotroph Design, farmer Jennie London of Northern New Mexico College, and artist Jerry Wellman of Axle Contemporary.
• Multimedia Gallery Opening featuring the works of Scuba Hi, Axle Contemporary, Cha Maul, and more!
• 1:00 – 4:00pm – Concurrent Workshops On the Hour – Upcylcing, Green Design/Build, Composting
• Upcycle Marketplace Featuring Local Artisans and Craftspeople
• 4:00 – 5:00pm – Live Entertainment from Alamo Sun  and Awards Ceremony

March 9th, 7pm-12am – The Zia Diner, 326 S Guadalupe St

• 7pm-9pm – Soiree/Silent Auction featuring works by Scuba Hi, Axle Contemporary, and Cha Maul. Music by Jenny Antill and John Black, Noah Devore and Alohi
• 9pm-12am – $5 All Ages Dance Party with Zen Tempest, DJ Prairie Dog and DJ Infektor

Based in Greyton, South Africa for his holistic science masters dissertation work, Joseph Stodgel addressed issues of pollution and community disintegration with holistic waste management and upcycling practices. Inspired to change the way that important ecological issues are typically addressed (with reluctance and guilt), he made rehabilitation a celebration and with a host of others organized the first Trash to Treasure Festival at the local open dumping site.

Commonly thrown away materials were utilized and upcycled into a stage, workshop space and several composting toilet blocks. The constructions as well as a series of workshops before and during the festival provided clear examples of how the great majority of the common domestic waste stream can be harnessed locally, easily and effectively to bolster community resilience and end detrimental linear waste mismanagement systems.

TRASH TO TREASURE – Making Rehabilitation a Celebration and Cultivating the Authentic Wholeness of Upcycling

trashtotreasurefest.org

transgreyton.wordpress.com

“A better method of containing the non-biodegradable waste stream is available, and to be found in the simple plastic bottle of which there is no end in sight. They are designed to be containment vessels, so it probably best that we use them as such.[1] This idea brings us to the eco-brick and the work of Pura Vida Atitlan of Guatemala and the other organizations and individuals worldwide who are stuffing their plastic waste streams into bottle bricks, preventing it all from wrecking pollution on their homes and utilizing the otherwise nocicycled materials as beneficial building components. Certain groups have even gone to the extent of turning the trash of entire landfills into schools they couldn’t otherwise afford.[2]

My first encounter with the act of filling plastic bottles with trash took place many years ago on a backpacking trip in the Sangre De Christo mountain range outside of my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. As we agreed with and were following Leave No Trace principles and practice to the best of our abilities, we were collecting all of our trash produced in a black sack that swelled to a substantial size. Wanting to save on space and do something around the fire, my friend John Armstrong began to stuff the whole lot of the trash into a one-liter sports drink bottle that we had. Instead of walking out with a substantially sized black trash sack full of trash, we walked out with a hardened bottle compressed to the brim.

Rediscovering this lost art of upcycling and considering it’s potential in building projects came to me just days before I departed to South Africa to conduct my dissertation research. I was excited to say the least at having found a simple solution to the question of what to do with “the rest of the stuff”. I was back in the area of Schumacher College and picked up the most recent copy of Resurgence where I quickly found an article by the environmentalist Nicola Peel whom I met last year at the College. I read of her work helping to clean up villages by spreading the simple wisdom of Pura Vida Atitlan, who have overseen and encouraged the creation of thousands upon thousands of plastic bottle bricks stuffed with all sorts of plastic trash to make walls, garden partitions, schools, and health centres for much cheaper than otherwise and of great benefit in the beautification of surrounding areas. [3] On PVA’s site I was awe-struck and inspired to find shot after shot of upcycled buildings going up and all of the smiling and stoked faces of the local people involved. I recognized quite quickly that this was the direction that I wanted to take the work in South Africa, and was deeply gladdened to have such an example to work from. It is home-made upcycling par excellence.” *