RECYCLING BOGOTÁ

Catalina Lozano-Moreno

 

Introduction

Recycling radically incorporated into a person’s way of living absorbs two different worlds: the world of the streets and the disposed, and the private world of consumer goods and producers of rubbish. The recycler uses both these worlds to survive: some in a rather organized and systematic way, others as part of a complex universe of circulating things charged with singular energies or attributes but always in the margins of the impoverished and the outcast. But paradoxically, this marginality is not outside but critically inside capitalism where precisely, these small movements of urban activity work. 

The subversion involved in the activities of the people who inhabit the streets is not set in a parasitic appendix of a capitalist society but inside of it. The waste of the system is still useful for many people who extract their own profit from something that was not meant to be used. But in the streets’ logic, these profits are measured with a different balance, a different reason that exceeds the sense that the “major society” is able to absorb.

My aim here is to understand how recycling is an ecological practice, in the sense that Guattari granted to it, involving the mind, environment and society. In addition, I want to explore how certain artistic practices adopt or appropriate, from this foreign and minoritarian mechanism of social organization, techniques and mechanisms of that ecology to create a new ecology, as a way of disseminating it and opening breaches in the dominant system.

Along these lines I am particularly interested in art practices that put in motion creative devices to work within social interstices. In this way, I am not interested in some kind of politically committed art but in the kind of practices that allow for the emergence of new physical or/and subjective spaces of co-belonging which call into being a revolutionary potential: that of humanity, as such. Instead of trying to do an inventory of possible artists or collectives I will refer to the Cambalache, a Colombian-Spanish art collective, born in Bogotá in the late nineties.

Framework

Struggle against illusion, rediscover the true difference in kind or articulations of the real. [1]

Creativity: First let us consider the notion of creativity. Creative processes offer catalytic centers of activity where “the passage from potentiality to the act, from common form to singularity, is not an event accomplished once and for all, but an infinite series of modal oscillations”.[2] The issue at stake is the ability to produce new political, cultural, social or economic registers. Creativity implies a political engagement with the world. Creative processes are those that generate difference and stand for means of differentiation. These elements work as primary political tools against social homogenization.[3]

Ecology: Guattari’s notion of ecology is appropriately introduced by the activity that the recyclers carry out in Bogotá. Guattari conceived ecology in a broad and generous way, calling it ecosophy as the ethico-political articulation of ecology. Thus, there are three ecologies: the environmental ecology, social ecology and mental ecology. This implies a permanent connection between the three: they reflect each other and build up from each other’s mode.

Ecology must stop being associated with the image of a small nature-loving minority or with qualified specialists. Ecology in my sense questions the whole of subjectivity and capitalistic power formations, whose sweeping progress cannot be guaranteed to continue as it has for the past decade.[4]

The recyclers subsist ecologically because their manner, their way of being, captures coherently their relation to what they live off and to the society they live by.

Autonomy: the third leading notion is the possibility of a political activity outside representation. Only by reaching autonomy can one stand for one’s own way of existence.[5] Only the minor language can be autonomous and politically independent, because the minor is a use of a major system of communication. The minor is that which acts from the borders but still within the social milieu. In this view, by being able to adequately make oneself autonomous, using a minor language to express one’s mental ecology, can one reach autonomy and political responsibility.[6]

Bogotá

Bogotá, el centro es tu corazón
¡Verdad, siempre te olvidas!
Bogotá, radiante de gente, basura, polvo y mugre vives.

Este verso te escribo porque te quiero,
Afronta tu mejor luz, la niñez y la juventud,
Bogotá, no es cosa rara para ti, ver tanta gente sucia.

Claro espíritu encarnador eres,
Hoy, ayer y siempre ha sido así.
Te miré muy bien, ya no hay flor
Diario pasa por la mugre el pasajero
Propicia aseo a la luz del extranjero,
Se opaca el sol en muerte y mugre
Así te quiero Bogotá, muestra querida,
Borrar el mugre que ves, procura
La PAZ arranca el fruto y no hay
Cada nubarrón que pasa padece,
Se ve doble por la mugre y el hambre,
Recupera la Plaza de Bolívar por un momento
Ella, deja el encanto a todo el que pasa
Ten en cuenta un sobrado, para aquel niño, joven, viejo que ve
Muchas vidas sofoca la tarde al querer un hogar en la calle
Da cemento, sin tierra, sin falta
Bogotá, ve semilla esta narración,
Verdad, no hay flor negra que renazca
Por primera vez, palpita, Bogotá.

(Bogotá, the center is your heart / It is true, you always forget! / Bogotá, radiant with people, rubbish, dust and dirt you live/This verse I wrote for you because I love you,/ Face your better light, the childhood and the youth, / Bogotá, it is not strange for you to see so many dirty people. Clear fleshing spirit you are, / Today, yesterday and always has been like this. / I looked at you carefully, there is not flower anymore / The passenger passes through the dirt daily, / The sun darkens in death and dirt / I love you in this way, Bogotá, our dearest, / Endeavor to erase the dirt you see / The PEACE tears off the fruit and there is not / Each cloud that crosses suffers, / It sees twice because of the dirt and the hunger, / Recover the Plaza the Bolívar for a moment / She leaves the charm for everyone that passes by / Consider a leftover, for that kid, young man, old man that looks / Many lives wanting a home in the street suffocates the afternoon / It gives pavement, without soil, without fault/ Bogotá, see this narration as seed / Truth, there is no black flower that rebirths / For the first time, palpitates, Bogotá). [7]

Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, has an estimated population of about 7 million people, around 16% of the national total, which is roughly 42 million people. This number is vague and rapidly growing. According to a 1993 census, the population of Bogotá was 4,945,448, which means it has grown more than 40% in 9 years. Around half of the almost 5 million (approximately 2.207.071) people registered in Bogotá then, were born somewhere else. [8]

Apart from the general urbanization expected of modern societies, the number of violently displaced rural workers who have moved to the urban areas in Colombia increases every day. These people have been fleeing the violence that has affected the country since the 1950s,[9] expanding the already impoverished shantytowns around the cities.[10]

In Colombia, more than 50% of the population lives under the poverty line. [11]  A growing number of people live by selling pocket calendars on public transport, or by begging for money and dancing to the music of the latest soap-operas in the streets, or by holding banners upon which are written sentences such as: “We are a displaced family, please help us.” Meanwhile, every driver and passerby avoids the painful gaze of the country’s misery. This has produced the burgeoning of a new means of earning a living: the el rebusque (the hunt), the daily struggle to get enough of something to keep on going.[12]  The rebusque covers a wide, confusing and surprising spectrum: opening a cafeteria-cum-photocopy-cum-stationers-cum-hairdressers-shop in the garage of a middle-class family house; riding a rickshaw (at the same time as selling mobile phone calls at cheap rates); using public transport to sell a huge range of things; routinely singing popular songs and tales and acquiring bags from people or recycling stuff from the rubbish. These multiple threads of activity cross back and forth the line of the law; the distance to that line shapes different technologies that make evident the clumsiness of any source of authority to standardize the course of how those mechanisms of survival work.

Recyclers, the “royalty” of el rebusque, are the subjects of rejection and marginalization. And from that marginalization, different ways of functioning arise to constitute other universes: values other than that of money and subjectivities other than that those produced by nations.

The Recycler and the Street

The street is a misfortune. The illuminated priest and the petty thief, the successful business man and the gatekeeper can slip on to the street. When someone turns into the street, they become invisible to the rest. They become part of the urban furniture of the underdevelopment. They stop existing for the ones that inhabit the surface because they live in the darkness, the deliriums and the sparkles of a better world…[13]

The people that live and work in the streets of Bogotá draw on the sidewalk their own map of the city, a map that produces a noise which counterpoints the official control. If willing to explore that map, one would have to understand a very different reading of the scratches on the sidewalk, of the functionality of the register boxes of public but not generalized utilities, of every corner, of every dumped shoe. There seems to be a kind of overlapping of functions: the sewer becomes a hiding place, the hidden shirt becomes a signature of this or that event, of this or that wound.

The continual trips of the recycler are the basis of an itinerant economy of a way of living and, furthermore, an expression of life. The collection of useful objects that have been disposed produces a very particular expressiveness that is merged with multiple and molecular processes of the transformation of the matter and the city.

These processes of transformation are always a resonance of the tactics of survival, creative and precarious, ephemeral and visible that are exposed without mediation and are, at the same time, becoming minoritarian and autonomous by-products, rejected by bourgeois society.

This becoming is, following Deleuze and Guattari, “a capturing, a possession, a plus value, but never a reproduction or an imitation”.[14] These becomings are a rewriting of the law, a redrawing of the roads, and a reconfiguration of the matter in the streets of Bogotá: the merging of private and the public, an exposure. It is the expressiveness that marks the territory: the digging into the wastage, the spread of rubbish, the fire… those elements that disregard the law of the majority.

Recyclers appropriate in their own manner the streets and the rubbish, two “outsides” of bourgeois society, as a milieu of activity and production:

• The streets are spaces of transit between the house and the work place, between the work place and a restaurant, between one point and another, whatever those points might be.[15]
• The rubbish is a disposable by-product of a world of commodities.

In these ways, there is a simultaneous re-appropriation of objects (‘rubbish’) and the city (‘streets’). Inhabiting the latter through the former produces a collective subjectivity by virtue of a work-always-in-progress. This subjectivity that survives outside the formal mechanisms of production disobeys the common preconceptions of control of these two elements.

Maria Teresa Salcedo, in her deep and compelling study about the homeless people of Bogotá, points out that ,

They avoid definition and deform signification whilst they interact with multiple government orders. In the end, one finds stories and writings which do not know where to go, appearances and inscriptions which insist in exceeding meaning whilst they blend with the form of the roads. There is something absurd that is at the same time logic and beyond logic.[16]

Their memory is embedded in the materiality of the street. The history of poverty and violence of the city could not be better told than by someone who has imprinted every step and every wound in the sidewalks of Bogotá. Precisely because of this, it is important not to irresponsibly mourn or celebrate the misery of the developing world, but to acknowledge the creativeness of the people who transform their difficulties into positive and singular registers.

Recycling as Ecology

Amparo Amaya[17], a Colombian poetess of the street, painter and shoe polisher, a woman who grew up in and with Bogotá, once told me: “it is nice to be homeless. One feels free, with no properties, with no responsibilities, gaminiando”[18]. Amparo, whose name paradoxically means shelter, has lived always in the misery and joyful oblivion of Colombia. She says: “I do not obey anyone because I don’t like slavery and I am always trying to be disobedient. But you have to understand, disobedience is not ‘not doing’; it is the opposite, since people are so submissive and what they want is that one does not do anything. Well, too bad for them: I disobey and always try to do something, to create”.[19]

Amparo Amaya, in her own manner, expresses what the Situationists once stated: “boredom is counterrevolutionary. In every way.”[20] The street artist and the recycler work close together, they pull forward their own reading of revolution by generating positive registers or creative products. In a city considered to be one of the most dangerous in the world, it is utterly important to acknowledge these incessant efforts of creative construction as alternative ways of living.

Many of the people who dedicate their life to recycling are homeless, and subsequently develop precarious architecture that, in some cases, expands to colonize areas that the city has abandoned to decay, while many others live in the very poor shantytowns of Bogotá. They all inhabit the city in different ways and with different values. It is a family economy, as well as a drug addict economy. It is an individual economy, as well as a group economy. It is an organized economy, as well as a cluttered one.

Those who make a living from the waste, that is, those who are organized and operate under very structured routines are a kind of informal guild. They are what the rest of the society calls recicladores(recyclers). They collect disposed goods and make them useful again by classifying them, allocating them to recycling centers and selling them. They operate on a political level, as well: they go on demonstrations to make clear the importance of their role and to denounce the abuse of the police, the criminal role of “social cleansing” groups, and other extreme-right death squads.

On the other hand, goods are also recycled at a different level, where things get embedded with an aggregated value granted in the street. Here, the spectrum of people amongst whom these objects circulate, enlarges the whole of the street community. The thief, the addict, the child, the prostitute, they all ‘add’ something. The object is not recycled in the same way; it cannot be classified or reused in the same way. This circulation of objects is generated by autonomous ways of exchange.

You can’t sell things just like that, like you take them from the bins or the cars, you have either to show them to lots of people or clean them or hide them for a while, something has to happen to them, that is why you see all those cachivacheros walking and looking for their luck before settling in a corner to sell.[21]

The recycling activities of Bogotá are performed through the incessant movement of these people around the city. The street recycling is a business that works informally but in such a way that produces a concrete result: The things disposed of are actually removed from the waste and taken either to “recycling centers” or to circulate in the street. The level of organization of these activities depends on the purpose of the act and, in a way, of the whole ethical universe that surrounds every recycler or every family of recyclers.

The community of recyclers is a complex composition of different singularities. It is a productive encounter that fosters creative developments and ecological practices.

In this way, the parches[22] in the streets of Bogotá are groups of people that cannot be defined under any header. The community of the parche is free and volatile but when constituted, strong and consistent. It is a community of people who are “not possession but limit, not supposition but exposure”[23], that is, a community of ephemeral existences that sympathize and come close because their manner brings them together. Salcedo refers to the places where suddenly a gathering of a parche occurs as relays, places where people always come back, where “people know they are going to come back to, but the relay is always going to be different every time, with different people who share dissimilar experiences. It is in this sense that the relay is a palpitating space” .[24] It is what Guattari calls “an intensive given which invokes other intensities to form new existential configurations”[25], configurations which build a being-in-common that fosters a particular kind of movement to arise.

The gathering of these subjectivities into a common acknowledgement of being-the-other of the visible is relevant to the role that many people in the streets play with the recycling of rubbish. In the 1980s, the term desechable (disposable) became a common word for some to refer to homeless people, in their view, useless, non-profitable social waste. It was around this time when recyclers started organizing to gain some kind of institutionalized role as part of a society that looked down on them and still does. It is the resistance of a way of living and inhabiting the city that is ecologic in a very broad sense.

The Art of Recycling

Colectivo Cambalache (cambalache means barter), formed in Bogotá in the late nineties, began a series of activities based on practices of exchange. Cambalache started working in El Cartucho, a centre of marginal social and economic activity in the centre of Bogotá which has recently been erased from the urban landscape and replaced by a huge flat space called The Third Millennium Park:

El Cartucho is a zone of difference in the city and at the same time a rootless alternative to cultural resistance. It is a vital space of enormous presence that, instead of being erased from the urban imagination, could be reconstructed, healed, and revived by the people that live here. El Cartucho is a social space that allows for the development of people rejected by formal society and it is a place in which are constructed alternatives and life projects that are not consolidated in other social spaces.[26]

Through the interaction with and the learning from the recyclers and homeless people of Bogotá in El Cartucho, Cambalache started assimilating and adapting mechanisms of exchange and itinerancy from them. The collective vindicates the value of bartering as understood by the recyclers by directly re-appropriating their techniques. Considering every object as an opportunity of exchange and a part of a larger universe, granted unlimited opportunities of singular insertion into this virtual community. 

El Museo de la Calle (The Street Museum), a project led by Cambalache since 1998, consisted of the exchange and exhibition of objects collected in and around Bogotá. It was focused on the mechanism of the carro esferado, a wooden structure with wheels used by the recyclers, which they called El Veloz.  Cambalache took all the objects collected and exhibited them in many other cities, enlarging the collection and keeping the exchange. The assimilation of techniques already developed in the streets became a way of producing spaces of communality and co-belonging.

 

In a similar way, Raimond Chaves, the Spanish-Colombian artist and former member of Colectivo Cambalache, describes his practice within the spectrum of autonomy as a means to produce change and revolutionize in small and molecular ways, the world the artist inhabits and with which he or she needs to interact.  

Nowadays, we need to vindicate crafting, it is almost vital and I do not mean the elaboration of gadgets to cheer us up or to lighten up our consciousness, I mean by crafting the personal, autonomous and joyful decision to make things which make life nicer, more comprehensible, more confusing and more destabilizing. Crafting is to know how to make fun of oneself. Crafting is autonomy and then if one also relates to people, confederates, groups, divides, comes back and coincides, fights together, better than better.[27]

The Do-It-Yourself spirit that Chaves vindicates is literally a calling for autonomous action to generate new forms of creation and interaction outside the regular spaces of sociability reserved for the art crowd. His itinerant newspaper, Hangueando, is produced on-site with the local community and opens the possibility of producing alternative sources of information and control over the media.

These forms of communality and co-operation need to be understood as distinct from instantaneous appearances of community. Events such as Jeremy Deller’s demonstration in the V Manifesta, 2004, in San Sebastian, where different local associations marched together, showed the difficulty of forcing a generation of communal experience. The art event swallowed the spontaneity of how a community can be fostered. Deller’s attempt was rather clumsy and oblivious of what the city really experiences, and of other conflicts that were being confronted.

It is the production of a collective inter-subjectivity which constitutes the creative emergence of a community. When art produces the potentiality of such a community to emerge, it does so with a dialogue between methods of production and the randomness of the ways in which the participation in the work can take place. In the same way, the community which is fostered by the recyclers’ practice is a coming together of ways of living gathered by virtue of their manners rather than their possible representation under the consensus of more established forms of political activity.

A community is formed from an active engagement with reality. It is the community that might be generated from Cambalache’s exchange activities with the Street Museum or Raimond Chaves’ mobile stations of drawing and production of a journal: it is giving a value other than that of money to certain objects; it is producing a potential transformation of objects according to people’s desires. This community, which is not permanent or fixed, which can be transitory and ephemeral but works as a complete entity and within its own temporal configuration is the community that might be initiated in the London Underground, organized by the Space Hijackers collective on the Central Line where, along with the act of communal leisure, there is an eagerness to make fun of institutions and to appropriate them for minor uses.

Creativity is not a way of conquering power but a channel of empowerment. That is to say, creativity, and through it, autonomy, are ways of taking control over one’s life to extract political potential from one’s own manner or way-of-being. It is a channel to create difference and to explore the political potential of differentiation.

As a low-technical practice, recycling develops within experimentation, on the basis of life itself (life as manner), as a way of being in the world: “a being that is its own being, and thus, while remaining singular and not indifferent, is multiple and valid for all, […] continually engendered from its own manner”[28].