Garbage Pin Project é apoiado pelo Ministério da Cultura Portuguesa – Direcção Geral das Artes
The Department of Portuguese Culture – General Direction of the Arts –, supports garbage Pin Project

Garbage Pin Project started in January 2008 as a virtual process through the communication established, mainly by email, with the 90 artists that have participated. All of them were sent the Garbage Pin kit with which a common proposal could be carried out.
The proposal consisted in suggesting to them to use the jewel during five days and to select, create or recreate, the contents kept in five plastic bags according to the perspective and reflections generated from the project: worth VS waste' in the current urban society.
In August 2008 each artist returned its concluding proposal, gathering this way a considerable corpus of rubbish bags.

This project renounces to an artistic line that offers solutions or results exclusively controlled by the artist. The attempt with this kind of action is to supply possibilities of construction of meaning. The action of the different participants on the open work brings new and distinct perspectives. The main purpose is to capture the singularity of every subjective interpretation within the discursive multiplicity that is developed around the same conundrum, finally bestowing it with a common place of expression: the aesthetic-performing object .

In this project, only the device was provided, the conceptual challenge, the invitation to reflection...; then, this device was activated by the diverse artists. The presence of the work could be felt already in its full auratic strength during the whole time that preceded its own materialization – without being able to control beforehand what the corpus final would be. This was a conscious bet, a long shot with a degree of the unexpected that corroborated the enigmatic character of the aesthetic experience.
The interpretation of the proposal by each artist was free and personal, within the inherent conditions of the project. Despite the maximum effort to not impose any rule relative to the formal, aesthetic or ethic codes, a challenge and a need of spacial synthesis was imposed because of the reduced dimensions of the rubbish bags provided. Some justified exceptions that break slightly the scheme have been verified but the majority of artists have operated within the referred parameters.
The challenge to optimize the reduced space as well as the selection of contents proposed for this project established an indirect analogy with the real challenge and the real need to promote a conscious and selective social attitude along with the problems of spatial limits derived and demanded by the rubbish production and destruction system in the contemporary city.

The Garbage Pin Project team was constituted with international character: Portugal, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, Belgium, Luxemburg, Austria, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Singapore, E.U.A and Japan.
The majority of artists belong to the environment of Contemporary Jewellery joined by artists from many other areas of work: Painting, Sculpture, Illustration, Photography, Performance, Installation, Video, Design, Fashion, Cinema, Theatre, Music and Literature. The selection criteria have been processed in an organic and natural way following the autonomous broadcast dynamic that the own project generated from the very beginning. This plurality was a wish to promote the contact between Contemporary Jewellery – commonly relegated to the register of the decorative arts – as an intervention device, and other expressive vehicles or artistic languages.

The concept of Contemporary Jewellery is wide and is expressed sometimes in antagonistic ways through its different manifestations. Within those, two extremes become evident: on one hand the typology of multiple adornment object managed by functional notions of design, on the other, the typology of the unique piece related to the subjective poesis of the so called author jewellery.
Nevertheless, under the same label of Contemporary Jewellery, one can distinguish another platform that nourishes itself from the previous ones adding an intervention and/or social critic role, able to trigger life mechanisms and to create occasional parallel realities that configure them as a productive platform of shared sense. Analysing the jewel through the notion of place, we can be conscious of the potential inherent to its characteristics, independently of any subjacent typology.
Besides the jewel being itself a place – such as a painting, a sculpture or an installation –, it presents the particularity of inhabiting a mobile place: the body.
The body is its place of support; its place of communication that, at the same time, carries it to different places. In this sense, the jewel can be understood as a place of dialectic between the intimate sphere and the public sphere since whoever carries it comes from his private space showing himself with the jewel in the public space. This mobility confers the jewel with a privileged character as social communicator that, on one hand, can be presented as a symbol of belonging or identification with a determined group or social class and, on the other hand, can be presented as an expression device generator of critical speech in the public sphere.
This jewel’s potential reconverted in a sociability space and/ or place of discussion – able to establish dynamic dialogs, of creating and recreating public opinion –, was the followed path in the present project. In this way, it is understood that the jewel could operate through transversal platforms that – without loosing its original referent – pushes the common borders of the Contemporary Jewellery concept, touching present dynamics in the theoretic frame and at the practices of the designated Current Art.

Garbage Pin Project is materialised in installation format gathering a corpus of 440 elements and will be shown internationally as of April 2009 in an itinerant exhibition.