Remade Artservis # 3 – Global Pop Pixel
In 2010 textile artist from Serbia Nena Skoko organized a 3rd edition of Remade Artservis workshop, opening gallery space to new art investigations on recycling and participatory creativeness. From 26th October till 1st November ladies and gents were making art on the theme Global Pop Pixel.
The project is based on the reuse of single material – old buttons, which are being collected by many of us, cos you never know when you might need one! Although recycling is making its way into social habits, mostly initiated by green campaigns on saving environment, it is still hard to resist the gloss and shine of stylish clothes and jewelry. So, sale is the top 3 words women all around the world are eager to hear!
In the contemporary society, when nothing is worth collecting and saving and everything is affordable, the piles on attics and in cellars, no matter of the former importance of its parts, lose even their memory value. Why a button couldn’t be your own personal Madeleine’s biscuit, with the scent of your past following you wherever you go.
What Remade Artservis wants to promote is the reuse of objects globally owned by a large number of people, who are ready to interact with artists in order to produce completely new things. Buttons are being used since the Middle Ages, and their simple form gives unimaginable possibilities for prints, carvings, colors, design….
Buttons, nowadays produced of plastic, represent an everyday, mostly cheap object, but exactly because they are so common, they shape universal visual language – like global pop pixel.
Buttons offer 2D and 3D perceptions; on canvas they could be used as spots in the manner of impressionism, or they could be particles for sculptures, badges, rings…. You can saw them, glue them, melt them…. Button can be construction material, or the metaphorical trigger….
Besides women from the group Zene s vezom (Nena Skoko, Milena Ristic, Lidija Vujovic, Ivana Cemerikic, Ivana Mladen, Elda Stankovic, Natasa Nebrigic, Dragana Markovic), there was Tatjana Kovacevic from Sarajevo and me. The plastic in bright colors was hard to resist for many who were passing by the gallery window, so in no time there were kids with their mothers and grandmothers, students, housewives joyfully succumbing to the sheer seduction of the buttons, which like ants scrawled around tables and shelves.
Within a week, the gallery looked like kindergarten, atelier, playground, workshop… all of the same time. And then, at the opening day, there it was: buttons assembled into reticular hair pins and earrings, grouped into badges, postulated onto rings, fixed on canvases and hanged on necklaces and bracelets…
Buttons from different boxes came together, old and new, fashionable and retro, buttons from granny’s coats and child’s blouses…. It was bright, playful, perky, it reflected all the good time we had during this spontaneous and unexpected moments of joint creativity.
(Ivana Podnar is a co-blogger on Body Pixel)