Conglomerate Vases

A new collaborative work with Kyoko Hashimoto: ‘Conglomerate Vases’ exhibited at A World We Don’t Want curated by Friends & Associates for Melbourne Design Week, supported by the National Gallery of Victoria.

Photos by Kristoffer Paulsen. Below is the text for the work. I also wrote an essay for this exhibition.

In geology, a conglomerate is a kind of sedimentary rock containing particulate objects in a cementious binder, such as clay or silica. Such  rocks are formal articulations of larger, unremitting processes of the earth; energetic forces that grind, melt, abrade and compress. 

In business, a conglomerate is a kind of corporation made up of smaller independent, often unrelated, businesses that operate for the benefit of the conglomerate meta-structure.

Business conglomerates have formal articulations too. These vases articulate the conglomerate of industrial waste-making machines. They bind waste materials together in a way that is often praised by design media as a sustainable recycling practice. But the conglomeration is indiscriminate: the work ignores the assortment problem of waste and tacitly condones the generation of waste in the first place. 

Why do we allow our materials to become so assorted that that easiest thing to thing to do with it is mash it up to create more stuff? This is the world we don’t want  – a world in which the accelerationist agenda for new products views existing materials and products as nothing more than food for the machine. 

The broader socio-technological conglomerates of waste-making machines is bound and cemented by regulatory policies that privilege capital expansion, economic growth and extravism; the processing and consumption of the earth.  Within this framing, design practices are smaller particulate activities subsumed by conglomerate forces of production, operated not necessarily consciously or even willing, but pressured by a smothering need for survival in larger economic structure.

I also wrote an essay for the exhibition.