GARBAGE TOUR (2019-ONGOING)
Garbage Tour is an ongoing experiential site-based research project that incorporates a hybrid social practice component. Guided by Lucas Cook and Natalie Hayes the recurring unauthorized tours aim to result in interdisciplinary making, and enlightenment within the banal. It takes place at and in the energy of Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park, centered around the Union Ship Canal that feeds into Lake Erie, on the Westernmost edge of South Buffalo—a bygone “smart growth” park and brownfield redevelopment site which defies any typical or idyllic park utilization. Instead this half park, half commercial industrial complex most often hosts remarkable amounts of accumulated trash due to various coinciding factors. Spread throughout the park are unintentional monuments, relics and artifacts embedded into the physical landscape signalling back to its historic past as once an essential site in the process of local steelmanufacturing.
One can occasionally encounter a transient dogwalker, biker, or fisher, but most often one will find oneself alone. Along with parking spot picnics, harmless illicit activities, and the rare recreation, the park has become a popular spot for illegal dumping of household and/or industrial objects. Collaborating with some serious municipal neglect and careless visitors—litter from car-bound guests, overflowing public trash cans, or debris blown in via the nearby highway make this park a public cesspool and/or a treasure trove for all types of junk.
Garbage Tour consists of guided tours of the area during which visitors can choose to collect and respond to/with the garbage that most compels them; the peak harvest season is anywhere from late February to mid-April, when the terrain is flattened from snow and refuse is made more visible/accessible. Garbage Tour intends to bring Buffalo Lakeside Commerce Park into the light, including and with emphasis on all of its accumulated trash; it is a long-term, tactile study of the park’s industrial history, interminable development, and implicit mystery.
“The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum.” - PKD