Sallehlab

Sallehlab was a repair/upcycling workshop organised with MFA students during my residency at VCUQ. The idea was to experiment with cleaning and opening up broken or discarded products, and see what could be done with them. Many students said it was their first time doing that kind of project. In an environment with a bunch of product design graduates, I was a bit surprised.

Hands and tools. Dirt and loose parts. Learning from YouTube videos. Even those highly educated students with access to fully equipped workshops and a Fablab found repairing simultaneously exciting and frustrating, with a combination of creativity and frequent dead-ends. Some procedures didn't work, others required spare parts impossible to fecth during our short time together. Upcycling was more fun, though - even more so as they were free to be more speculative than practical. Furniture and garments with materials brought from the desert field trip came out of that. One student used the 3D printer to fabricate a tool extension. The images below show only some of the processes and results.

A curious note is that one of the pieces of car tire retrieved from the desert had a stamp of origin: it had been manufactured in Santo André, in Brazil. That reminded me immediately of Parque Escola, where the second MetaReciclagem lab had been established in 2003. When I think of it again now (in 2024), I can't help thinking also of the seringueira trees used to produce rubber, and colonial practices in the Amazon forest.