ABSTRACT
More often than not, waste attracts artists because of its threatening monumentality. This chapter, however, is not about the monumental nature of trash, or about the dystopian urban imaginaries that mega-trash immediately inspires, instead, it is about imaginaries of a more amiable kind, suggestive of cities that embrace humans instead of overwhelming and even crushing them. The chapter is a reflection of what art does with, and to, urban refuse at its early stages when it is still tiny, a newborn really that will only later accumulate and grow into gigantic proportions, and about what British street artist Ben Wilson and Mexican artists Ilana Boltvinik, Mariana Mañón, and Rodrigo Viñas, the members of art collective TRES, are able to accomplish with the help of one particular type of litter – the spat-out chewing gum one routinely finds on the streets. Artists sitting on the pavement and bending over discarded chewing gum are imagining new possibilities for the city they inhabit. When Ben Wilson paints a quaint micro-landscape on a chewing gum blob, he is not only “decorating” it, but suggesting that urban life could be quite different from what it is. Similarly, TRES’s archeological study and lab work around spat-out chewing gum amasses biological and environmental data not only to determine the nature of human behavior and urban reality, but, more importantly to create new imaginaries for the city they inhabit.
