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COLLASUSOFFICE FORCOLLABORATIVESUSTAINAIBLITY

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The Office for Collaborative Sustainability, COLLASUS, is an interdisciplinary network interested in advancing the radical in everyday life. The office began as an Internet based platform to maintain collaboration amongst the founding members when overseas and across the country. The office is held together by the ubiquitous infrastructure of the Internet: skype calls, google docs, dropbox, blogging, wikipedia, and faithfully uncredited research. But it cannot deny the real muck that we exist in: compost, dirt, suburban developments, gentrified urban ghettos and dayjobs. COLLASUS seeks to develop the interactivity of these two worlds. The virtual allows for consistently new territories of exploration, while the muddy substrate allows for cultivation.

COLLASUS is a problem solving network. We recognize architecture, installation, curation and research as the fruits of our labor, but only insofar as they provide the hyperlink to the next project. In this way, COLLASUS is websurfing, it is simultaneously structure and content. It is the way we find information and it informs what we look for.

INTERVIEW W/ AN EMPIRE....p25

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TERRITORIAL REGIMES....p1

LIFEFORCE....p9

PLATFORM EDEN....p17

Exhibition and SeminarBerlin, Germany2010 - Ongoing

InstallationOne Brooklyn Bridge ParkBrooklyn, NY2009

Urban AgricultureBrooklyn, NY2009 - Ongoing

Performance and InstallationRome, Italy2007

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TERRITORIAL REGIMES

As part of an ongoing project that seeks to re-engage the abandoned Iraqi Embassy (Pankow-Berlin, Germany), the COLLASUS group has asked artists both international and local to produce site specific works for the abandoned building.

There were no guidelines, and no limit to participation. The group of participants are of varied backgrounds, ages, and artistic practices.

The project is seen as an opportunity to find an alternative use for the politically charged space through collectivity, art, and criticism. The work will remain anonymous in the former embassy.

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From pop-culture photo albums, to music videos and declassifed government documents, a rich digital portrait is produced at the outset of our engament with the building and distributed to participants. The COLLASUS website serves as a meeting point to discuss the document and propose new projects.

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RESEARCH DOCUMENT

1. Sample spreads from COLLASUS’ initial research document. 2. www.iraq-embassy.com: web presence for Territorial Regimes’ call for entries. 3. COLLASUS website: www.collasus.com.

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Removing overgrowth in the garden

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SELECTED WORKS

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1. Billy Rennekamp, Real Remnants of Fictive Sports 2. Eliza-beth Skadden, Soft Rains, Intervention. 3. Matthew Austin, The Plant that Ate Berlin. 4. David Knowles, Neutral Politi-cal Space. 5. Legwork, Audio Installation.

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1. Part I of seminar held on site at the former Iraqi embassy 2-4. Part II of seminar held at PROGRAM Initiative for Art and Architecture, Berlin, www.programonline.de.

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In conjuction with guerilla installation of work in the former embassy, COLLASUS hosted a discussion series through the Public School Berlin, berlin.thepublicschool.org.

SEMINAR

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LIFEFORCEInstalatio

FOODGrowing vegetables, the soil is remediated with other decomposing organic matterLIBIDO

A short home video of machines

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ENERGYHeat and methane gas are generated by decomposing organic wastes

WATERWater is collected throug the funnel and distilled

FOODGrowing vegetables, the soil is remediated with other decomposing organic matter

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Four lifeforce diagram: Initial plan of installation

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LIFEFORCE MACHINES:

1. Compost for soil remediation 2. Storage bags to perserve raw materials 3.Planting bladders for hydroponic gardening 4. Rainwater collector 5. Solar still, rainwater purifier 6. Biodigestor producing methane gas for cooking

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Matt’s Rocket Launcher, what is this?

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Building methane collectors with chicken waste from local live poultry market.

Assembling Rain Collection System

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The garden is a platform for a number of outreach and remediation efforts that invite, engage, and suggest new modes of living. COLLASUS’ agricultural work is centered around (but not limited to) a series of inter-connected backyards and abondoned lots in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. The aim is to eventually repurpose this expanse of leftover space into an active food and community

PLATFORM EDENsystem. Farming in the city is an uphill battle, but a battle that can be won by taking cues from the subversive agricultural practices. Our aim is to work like an invasive species. We are writing petitions, applying for grants, collecting compost, giving demonstations, teaching classes and expirimenting with new structures in gardening.

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143 Stockholm St., a vacant lot owned by NYPD, was the inspiration to petition the neighborhood to create an interactive green space. The project aims were to provide youth with a connection to the earth and exposure to sustainable small scale food production. The lot has been vacant for over 15 years accumulating garbage; neverthless, the NYPD claims that they have future plans for a parking lot on the site. COLLASUS will begin planting a field of sunflowers (to extract lead) in the spring of 2011 to begin creative use of the land.

Rainwater Cistern

Compost Station

Theatre

Rainwater Collection Hood

Raised Planting Beds

Children’s Zone

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1. Petition to NYPD for use of a forgotten peice of land. 2. Phase I proposal: a sunflower field to extract heavy metals. 2.Plhase II proposal: active community and agriculture generator.

Compost Painting at the Invisible Dog Art Center is a soil remediation earthwork that strives for a net environmental benefit through its educational renewable painting process. Inspired by community scale composting projects in Brooklyn, the Compost Painting project scavenges an abundance of urban art and garden materials, and carefully sourced waste organics.

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1. Compost for soil remediation. 2. Storage bags to perserve raw materials. 3.Planting bladders for hydroponic gardening 4. Rainwater collector. 5. Solar still, rainwater purifier. 6. Biodigestor producing methane gas for cooking.

Mariette Auvray’s video projects help us consider territoriality anew. Des chapitres du conflit and Territorial Regimes both address issues of territoriality on multiple registers. In this context, the notion of tactile geography that Mariette explores in the ‘Vegetable Map’ sequence provides a new means of conceptualizing one’s relationship to territory. These are two excerpts from a documentary Mariette made last year “Le lac des brumes”, about the relationships within the members of a vietnamese family in France. She got to work with the father in several sequences. Manh H. was a philosophy teacher in Berlin during the 80s, he is now working as a cook in France. Within the film, her attempt was to show him as the character who is distant from the other family members. He was really concerned with his past, as opposed to his daily life, constantly in the restaurant

1. Compost for soil remediation 2. Storage bags to perserve raw materials 3.Planting bladders for hydroponic gardening 4. Rainwater collector 5. Solar still, rainwater purifier 6. Biodigestor producing methane gas for cooking

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Performance: spraying something29

184 Wilson Ave. is growing soil, food, and polinators while catching rainwater and connecting neighbors in three previously neglected adjoining backyards. The gardens convert 1500 lbs of waste from the surrounding neighborhood each season into compost for its raised beds, thereby transforming an industrial area of Brooklyn into a fertile ecotone. While the past two seasons have produced abundant food donations to the community, 2011 will mark the first year of selling produce to cover seed and infrastructure costs.

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Interview with an Empire

Seeking to engage public space in Rome to critique Italy’s mediatic culture. The performance took the form of a mythical drama in order to explore and re-appropriate the classical paradigms of Italy’s aesthetic history that continue to influence the discourse of the media. In this sense, the project was an effort to develop, through a historico-aesthetic critique, a minor art capapble of resiting the hegemony of the spectacle.

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We constucted a shallow basin in the courtyard of Pallazetto Cenci that served as the site for a performance that investigated Italy’s military history. This creative analysis hoped to provide a space for the foundation of new socio-political models outside of dominant statist discourse.

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