Make This Last Forever
Recology Artist in Residency
San Francisco, CA
2023
Summer long artist residency at San Francisco’s Recology
Macro Waves (Robin Birdd David & Jeffrey Yip) utilizes the framework of archiving to make sense of the intergenerational stories of movement and transition held in the objects we inherit–whether the things passed down directly by immigrant elders or our collective responsibility to contend with the growing mass of consumer waste.
Who is responsible for your things after you’re gone? And how do we honor and contend with the belongings of previous generations–especially when they’ve felt the need to hold onto everything as a means of survival? Macro Waves embraces the spirit of collection, reuse, and repair passed down to them as they seek out the memories and sentimentality of the objects they’ve gathered from the Public Reuse and Recycling Area. Along with cataloging a growing repository of 3D scans they’ve made of their accumulated objects, the artists interviewed San Francisco residents about their experiences managing the stuff they’ve had to sift through from their elders and how this has shaped the interviewees’ relationships to their own belongings.
Throughout the exhibition, e-waste generations too boxy and out of date–signal boosters, an AM radio, stacks of video screens–have been resuscitated to transmit and display the gathered interviews and digital archive of objects. This presentation of inherited objects and current day stories plays with our sense of time: talking backwards to earlier generations and our younger selves, as well as into the future. The crackly grain to this obsolete technology is a feature, not a bug. This is not seamless, high def precision. The artifacts that emerge from this passage of information from one generation to another–people and technology–gives each iteration its own sensibility.
This generative refiguration also manifests in other sculptural pieces, where materials like rice bags, recycled plastic takeaway containers, and colorful reusable shopping bags are remixed into sails for model boats, a lamp stand, or the backing of a folding chair. New artistic gestures live alongside and within found objects, infused with care and inherited knowledge.
Additional LinksWho is responsible for your things after you’re gone? And how do we honor and contend with the belongings of previous generations–especially when they’ve felt the need to hold onto everything as a means of survival? Macro Waves embraces the spirit of collection, reuse, and repair passed down to them as they seek out the memories and sentimentality of the objects they’ve gathered from the Public Reuse and Recycling Area. Along with cataloging a growing repository of 3D scans they’ve made of their accumulated objects, the artists interviewed San Francisco residents about their experiences managing the stuff they’ve had to sift through from their elders and how this has shaped the interviewees’ relationships to their own belongings.
Throughout the exhibition, e-waste generations too boxy and out of date–signal boosters, an AM radio, stacks of video screens–have been resuscitated to transmit and display the gathered interviews and digital archive of objects. This presentation of inherited objects and current day stories plays with our sense of time: talking backwards to earlier generations and our younger selves, as well as into the future. The crackly grain to this obsolete technology is a feature, not a bug. This is not seamless, high def precision. The artifacts that emerge from this passage of information from one generation to another–people and technology–gives each iteration its own sensibility.
This generative refiguration also manifests in other sculptural pieces, where materials like rice bags, recycled plastic takeaway containers, and colorful reusable shopping bags are remixed into sails for model boats, a lamp stand, or the backing of a folding chair. New artistic gestures live alongside and within found objects, infused with care and inherited knowledge.
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