During my month-long artist residency in Negra-Blanca-Negra, Spain (let me know if you are interested in learning about this fascinating Muslim-Jewish/ Conquistador-Catholic name history!), I had been excited for an unexpected Economía Circular (use what you have) art-based educational program. I had met the guest artist who was leading the workshop (whose day job is architectural modeling) at an orchard gathering to replace the ammonium nitrate contents in used plastic bottles hanging from the branches throughout the mandarin orange groves—a “sustainable technology” method to facilitate mosquito suicide so they don’t destroy the mandarins.The first thing I see when I arrive in our Taller de Reparación (referring to repairing objects, not reparations for the families of formerly enslaved peoples) at
EuroVértice, Kokoa Repair Workshop took place at the Miguel Ángel Abenza Centre are long tables covered with brand new, unopened plastic packages of new materials—bags of new eye hooks, grommets, screws, nails, disposable zip ties (in my world used to inhibit political protestors), dozens of colorful thick plastic tubes of glues and paints, over a dozen different kinds of tape, drills, hot guns—it looks like a hardware store had neatly emptied its inventory from aisles 6-23—a veritable handyman’s feast. I wondered if Martha Stewart happened to be visiting, too! Next to the tables on the ground is a large pile of used stuff—discarded chairs, hot water bottles, games, and what otherwise would be considered trash. Uh oh, not again, I thought—destroying useful things in the name of “creative” reuse? Practical “art” made from trash using an enormous quantity of new materials only to become trash again? Using trash to make more trash? Wait. Don’t assume. Be here. Be curious.
Audience/ participants gathered, ready for action. Elena Azzedin, the executive director of AADK Spain, a platform that is the main stakeholder in the LIFE project alongside Blanca Town Council (the same woman who owns the mandarin orchard) who was translating from Spanish for me, mumbled something about European greenwashing in response to the EU corporate sponsorship. I thought, Oh! This is going to be good!
We began with a lengthy introduction by the director of LIFE New European Bauhaus for the EU who described in detail their reimaging edificios through barrios’ participatory process, transdisciplinary, multi-land engagement. Their priorities being: 1. Bellos-aesthetic; 2. Sostenbile-sustainable, biodiversity, climate; 3. Juntos-inclusion, diversity. The artist did a great job weaving together the intergenerational community (aside from all the tape they stuck on the ground for the kids to draw on—why does it so often seem irrelevant that tape is a petroleum product? Use it for a few moments and then in the trash. (Despite some of its challenges, I definitely recommend Zal Batmangliji’s 2013 film, The East: “The evidence is in the trash”). The artist handed the children a large plastic water bottle and a violin and asked them to compare the aesthetic, social, economic, material values. Tener valor? What a fantastic relief it was to integrate children into this vital conversation!
Including children (there was childcare, but it was on the floor, smack in the middle of the presentation, not segregated to a different space) was particularly meaningful to me since recently in my own community back home in Colorado during a five-part (two hours every Sunday) “Tools for Civic Engagement” learning series, a group of between 30-50 adults gathered to silently observe a variety of panelists (I am emphasizing silent observation rather than active participation because we were essentially discouraged from doing so, but that is another story). During our allotted Q & A moments, an audience member asked what we could do to get the word out about the converging eco-social-political issues at hand. I offered a question/ response about directly including the children in our community in these kinds of educational events. My share was not well received, to say the least.
The director of LIFE New European Bauhaus provided detailed PowerPoint slides illustrating their Bauhausing goals. I was thrilled—Bauhaus as a verb! However, the sustainability jargon was too familiar. (I should tell you that when I interviewed for the Director of Sustainability position at Naropa University about ten years, I detailed my concerns about how “sustainability” is misappropriated through greenwashing, ecocapitalism, perception management, Jevons Paradox, and more. I didn’t get the job.)
Of course, the guest artist brought up the United Nation 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) intended to “end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all by 2030”. Need I say more? Well I do! Read Radical Art in Action: Unlearning We Think We Know, my new book (coming out early 2026!). It became clear to me that this was more of the same Band-Aid approach to converging crises. No addressing root causes. And we hadn’t even begun our feeling-good-about-ourselves-doing-something-about-our-global-waste-crisis-as-we-create-more-waste extravaganza.
Since I don’t speak Spanish well, I’m not sure if we were instructed that this was a race, à la a reality TV show timed competition—which team could use as many resources/materials as possible in the shortest amount of time. We were grouped together in packs of five and six. Old and young (ranging from a vocal toddler to numerous octogenarians) descended like a pack of ravenous hyenas—ready to transform trash! (Into more trash!)
In the name of Art! In the name of Planet Earth!
It’s like saying (and a millennial Bahai activist at the Parliament of the World’s Religions did say this to me): I’m an environmentalist. I don’t use business cards. You can find me in The Cloud. The absurd, greenwashing-marketing claim: “We’re Paperless!” refuses to acknowledge the vast forests razed to install the miles of data centers required to support this Inferno. The Cloud. It sounds ethereal, fluffy, benign, innocuous—not a ravaging, force of global devastation. Almost angelic in its omnipresent stature, it doesn’t sound like a noun; “The Cloud” sounds beyond our mortal world. It is, however in fact, urgently an object rooted in a myriad of object relations. The Cloud total power usage is approximately 30 nuclear power plants. By 2028, AI will increase 11-fold datacenters’ water consumption. Their closed-loop cooling system is anything but sustainable. (Check out Katie Singer’s always deeply informative Substacks!) Yet, it is not unusual for me to be in an environmental activist meeting where someone mentions AI as the go to for updated stats on the devastation of our world—for example using AI to predict current and future habitat loss, rising ocean levels, extreme temperature fluctuations. Do we really need more data?
Why is it so challenging for us to distinguish between using what we have and making more cyber and material trash? Are we really going to “save the planet” by hot glueing together trash and calling it art? This feels like lip service to the circular economy. Tokenism at its finest.
I pause for a devotional moment to remember Agnès Vardas’ glorious film Les Gleneaux et Moi—a remarkable exploration of the socio economic, aesthetic, and communal vitality of gleaning and its concomitant prohibitions. “Salvaging is a matter of ethics,” (gleaning activist interviewed in Vardas’ film). Gleaning, like reclaiming, is one of many confrontational practices that disables the myth of scarcity—one of the most vile, avoidable plagues of contemporary society. I suggest our practice of decolonization includes gleaning—disrupting capitalist accumulation of the new and improved, by undermining the myth of scarcity. I do not glean because there is not enough. I glean because there is more than enough! There is more than enough, so let us use what we have. Living through regeneration and abundance means experiencing every potentially disposable object as kin. This commitment becomes a practice of reciprocal listening. Listening to each object as a storyteller sharing their histories of relationality, their embodied energy, generates an art of the possible. This art manifests collective re-membering. Re-membering, for example, Rosa Luxemburg: “Before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible; after it happens, it is seen as having been inevitable.” Gleaning can become a radical Redistribution Movement.
Globally and locally, redistribution is a vital, communal response to our consumption/ waste-obsessed societies. For example, in Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, my cross-cultural eco-justice book, the characters realize “The result of…water battles is deepening violent conflicts over water rights, not water shortage— there is plenty of water for all. As with our international epidemic of malnutrition—there is more than enough food in the world, the problem is not quantity, but rather distribution, infrastructure, and quality” (Endnote 154). Gleaning is a conscious practice of undermining this violence of the everyday. Gleaning can only begin to transform the violence of the everyday if we develop a collective practice, a gleaning movement that is institutionally supported through infrastructural redesign, corporate engagement (not co-optation—a fine line that can slice (divide & conquer) if we are not hypervigilant).
In addition to the unctuous tendencies so common in sustainability education and sustainability management (including much resiliency programming and regeneration leadership curriculum) is the complete omission of the collective and of infrastructures to support the individual in relation to the collective. To counter infrastructures that support exploitative and extractive industry (not only ecologically extractive, but psychologically, physically, and socially), we must co-create what I call infrastructures-of-conscience. Such infrastructures require organized reproduction that reflects the porous membranes of ontological constituencies. Manuel Shvartzber Carrio proposes this kind of collaborative methodology that integrates “tools of political institutions, broad cultural and social deliberation, and complex multi-organizational cooperation” (“Defending Democracy: Against Anarcho-Capitalist Architecture”).
During the “repair trash” workshop, the intergenerational audience appreciated how the guest artist demonstrated that when considering architectural repairs, we should focus on building triangles because they are stronger than squares. They shared that the EU Bienniel Architecture used to focus on innovation, now it focuses on how not to participate in extraction economy. Given that the word invention comes from the word “inventory,” why is innovation inherent in extraction economy? When we create from what we have—taking inventory, when we use what we have (reclaiming, repurposing) instead of buy new, buy more, we are practicing awe, not sleepwalking through wonder. When we ask who produced those metal eye hooks, how was the duct tape made and how did it get to be neon orange with neon green mustaches, where is the hot glue eventually going to melt? We are taking inventory; we are practicing awe, not sleepwalking through wonder. Embodying supply-chain consciousness is a practice of the sacred, a desire to become in relation to others. Supply-chain consciousness reflects systems thinking.
As I write in Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, my interdisciplinary, critical philosophy art book: The culture industry in which entertainment reigns is rooted in colonialist acquisition—everything we materially and psychically take for granted: metal knobs (mined somewhere by someone) on that new kitchen cabinet to privatization of water to agribusiness to fossil fuels. In her fantastic! Methodology of the Oppressed Chela Sandoval invokes Barthes’ rhetoric of supremacy of The Privation of History: abstracted from material history of what has been and what will come, “all is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from... this rhetoric of supremacy colonizes the colonizer’s consciousness as well...The privation of history thus inoculates consciousness—it procures a little tantalizing difference—but not too much; it protects and tames the colonizer’s imagination as viewer” (my italics 119-120.1). Check my multiple movement performances based on the complexities of “Where Are Your From?” If you are interested in exploring these themes together, please contact me at photo@carajudea.com.
Undermining this rhetoric of supremacy has been my motivating force for about 45 years. Since I was a child, I have been fixated on the inescapable correlation between trashing the earth, trashing our bodies, and trashing others who appear different. My convictions are not based on “choice” (the result of privilege), nor a fly-by-night fad (such as the film documentaries No-Impact Man and The Buy Nothing Year). This is a devotional pluriverse-of-being that permeates every aspect of one’s life. Rather than deprivation, drudgery, and sacrifice, this life-practice is rooted in joyful, playful, unexpected improvisational relationships. In Radical Art in Action, my Seed (instead of “chapters,” I use the term “seed”) titled “voluntary simplicity: misinformed allegation” addresses these complexities. In contrast, it is all the rage for artists to distinguish garbage from trash. Among them is Kelly Wood whose art is considered “recycling” because she photographs piles of trash bags on the streets (Sleek Magazine)!? The self-gratifying art-world labels are ridiculously telling about how society views both trash and art.
While I visited my brother-collaborator Bayo Akomolafe at the Repair and Aspen Global Leadership Network, 2023 Action Forum focusing on “courage, healing, and the art of repair,” Bayo questioned the very language of the illustrious gathering to which he was the Keynote. He spoke about the illusions and dangers of “repairing,” returning to the norm in our effort to avoid discomfort. See my article: “Dancing with Trickster: Audience as Storyteller” and movement piece at Las Vegas’ Ingenium Creativity Think Tank: Embodying Trickster: Self-Portraiture as Community with Bayo Akomolafe and Han Jemma Bayo’s warnings are also radically significant in the context of a Encontrar propias maneras de reparar; Reparacion/ Reciclamos y cuidados workshop. In the act of repairing, what are we destroying? How are we perhaps inadvertently maintaining the dis-ease of what we are trying to heal? See my article: “When the Cure Becomes the Disease: Climate Crisis Inflammation”
Before I left the States, I visited San Francisco’s artist residency program in RECOLOGY, Waste Zero. I got myself in trouble there, too, when I asked what would happen if their commitment to 95% used items could be 100%; if instead of the artists-in-residence using 5% new items in conjunction with the 95% found objects, what if they wouldn’t use anything new—what could that program look like? Given the material abundance in the Bay Area (I lived there for twenty years and Trash Night was always a thrill), I have no doubt an artist could be resourceful and find supplies they “need;” or, change their wants as an exercise in expanding their creative boundaries. My suggestion was not well received.
Having the “best intentions” is no longer enough. Also, telling ourselves that we can’t be “perfect” has become an insidious excuse leading to mass impotency and complicity. For his Utopian and Dystopian Imagination Language Arts class Zazu, my fourteen-year-old son is writing a story about a social value that has been taken too far—he chose “safety.” In “ALL SAFE,” one of Zazu’s themes is that the characters consent to their victimization—being mentally and physically altered to maintain their own safety and a safe “common good.”
In Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene, I chart how ethnicity, sexuality, and aesthetics play out a tripartite problematic of internalized oppression demonstrated through the Stockholm Syndrome—re-embedding the “common good.” The Stockholm Syndrome, in addition to identifying with and defending captors, is a paradoxical psychological phenomenon which displays a radically effective technique to subvert any attempts at self-definition or resistance to normalizing tendencies.
As I am now writing in Radical Art in Action:
Balance or Compromise? At every turn, I am told I need to compromise. However, what if simply being alive on this planet, particularly in 2025, is in itself a compromise—an act of unwitting participation in the violence of the everyday. How can we find “balance” in a system that depends so violently on conformist monoculture? Conformity is not benign. We do not conform by default. Conformity is violence. Equilibrium is completely obfuscated by equality-as-assimilation. Complicity to conformity reigns.
During our economía circular, reciclamos y cuidados workshop, at every turn, someone young and old was sawing, filing, drilling, mixing sawdust with glue, measuring, leveling, wrapping, tearing, cutting, painting, pounding, reassembling for balance, reassembling for strength, reassembling for durability, adding flourishes to beautify. ¡Ay, Dios!, with this kind of teamwork and industriousness, we could “save the planet!” or at least “make the world a better place.” However, less than five minutes after our wildly verbose presenters co-led by a septuagenarian and a preteen—during which each team cheered for the others (our group decided to take a wooden chair that had been broken in three pieces into a multifunctional galan de noche)—and everyone filled out questionnaires to ensure the grant money would continue to flow (remember this is Spain, not the US), all the participants disappeared. Did anyone wonder where all this stuff was going?
When I asked the guest artist who was leading the workshop where the “repaired” objects were going to go, they paused, taken aback. Their flustered response was: “You can take them.” I also asked the director of LIFE New European Bauhaus for the EU. No tengo ni idea.
I was reminded of my climate justice performance at Asheville, North Carolina’s Get Off the Grid Fest in which nine solar power companies were promoting their businesses. After I presented Zazu Dreams in the context of questioning the falsehoods of “renewable” energy, I went to each solar company booth and asked what they do with used solar equipment—for example, when their clients upgrade. Not one had an answer, except for the single suggestion: “well, we can use it as a coffee table.”
Although I did not take the sustainability workshop’s trash made into more trash with me, I am now working in an exciting collaborating with LIFE New European Bauhaus for the EU. We are focusing on building an international network to share ideas about practical, beautiful, everyday trash-reuse. The coalition includes villages in Latvia, Hungary, Spain, and now Colorado.
For local details see two models that I live and teach: The Love Bus: Beauty & Waste In the Face of Climate Crisis and S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local). S.O.U.L. (celebrating our two-year anniversary next month!) guides us to engage our local communities using surprising, coalitional practices rooted in ethical and equitable relationships—using only local resources. Through an urgent commitment to creative collaborations that focus on S.O.U.L., we can transform industrial-capitalism’s everyday tyranny and violence—entitlement. S.O.U.L. engages five place-specific strategies that create a bridge between individual response-ability, community action-based creative collaboration, infrastructural re-design, corporate accountability, policy reform.
If you are interested in pre-ordering my new book, please contact me: photo@carajudea.com.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including the critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era and Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene. Alhadeff’s theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for international films and public television. She has been interviewed by The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica Radio, NPR, and the New Art Examiner. Alongside Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E. Hansen, Eve Ensler, Avital Ronell, David Orr, Alphonso Lingus, Lucy Lippard, SHKG Humpty Hump, Henry Giroux, Paul Hawken, among other activists, scholars, and artists. Alhadeff’s photographs/performance-videos have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former professor of Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff and her family live in their eco-art installation repurposed schoolbus where they perform and teach creative-zero-waste living, social permaculture, and cultural diversity. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines.
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