Thursday, April 5, 2007

End of show

5 people in household

Taking down Souvenir as OPENSOURCE was both a relief and a deep disappointment. Getting the garbage reduction system in place represented the greatest effort in the project. Once the systems were in place, we were either on track or feeling deeply guilty for accumulating unnecessary souvenirs.

To recycle my souvenirs I collected during the show, I had to unwrap each item. I placed all of the items from the five day control in on one side of the room and all of the souvenirs from the 25 days of the project on the other side of the room. There is nothing like taking hours to unwrap trash to make you feel like art and life are futile. About halfway through the unwrapping, I realized the cumulative detritus from the show was going to be less than the five day control, during which time we collected our trash, but did not alter our behavior. Sure enough, the garbage pile from the entire run of Collected was less than the first five days.

We are going to have a family meeting and decided what patterns we want to keep up, even though the show is over. I know I am off paper towels, paper cups, plastic drink bottles, and plastic grocery bags.

I do love recycling. It feels just great to blithely chuck bottles, paper, #1 and #2 plastic, and cans into the recycling. It is almost guilt free. On the the other hand, I feel no pleasure in throwing away things I cannot recycle.

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