Basurama (trash-o-rama) is a non profit organization based in Spain that has been experimenting with different approaches to waste over the last decade. It has developed a framework to create projects that provide a better understanding of waste as a resource, and raise awareness of waste production. These projects take shape in many different ways, such as workshops, public art interventions, maps or data visualizations, and work with a wide range of stakeholders, ranging from neighborhood communities and local artists to municipal governments. Across all the different kinds of projects, participant-users take active part in the search, selection of waste, as well as in the collaborative process of design and construction. Through practice, participants become aware of the implications of using waste as a source material: properties, availability, and transportation. The process changes the way designers and communities approach the design project, and provides a better way to understand how to work with what already exists, be it abandoned public space or leftover materials. Among many other activities, Basurama’s practice has been centered on workshops, that last 2-4 weeks, to plan, research, design and construct. In that short period of time, Basuramas’s team connects with local agents to understand their needs and develop a site specific project. Local materials and techniques are used to enable the appropriation of the project by local actors and allow its replication. The proliferation of industrial waste, like car tires or pallets, allows the reproduction of these techniques across countries and certain reuse methods have been developed. Due to the limitations of a short intervention and, in order to understand and provide this experience to others, we thought it was a good idea to analyze in detail how this process was. As a Basurama member I felt the need to extend this kind of reuse practices beyond the scope of our own projects and to conceptualize the work that had been done. These projects work both as a prototype and a ‘hands on’ method to train locals to build their own environments. This paper is an analysis of the 2-4 week long workshops that Basurama has been developing abroad. It will use as a case study the group of interventions in Latin America from the RUS project, specially RUS Lima. We have found that to achieve environmentally responsible processes that reuse materials, it is fundamental to take into account the limitations and locations of materials and the qualities and possibilities of the selected space. That would be a bottom line for almost all reuse projects. However, to design and construct collectively and allow the appropriation of the project by local agents they must also be included in the project since the beginning, as a fundamental variable for the long term success.

1. April 3rd 2013
Cambridge, MA, USA.
Cultural Agents Initiative
Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
Read full paper at
http://basurama.org/txt/basurama-a-framework
-for-designing-collectively-with-waste
Basurama: a framework for
designing collectively with waste
Pablo Rey Mazón. Basurama.
basurama.org
Contents, unless noted, by Basurama under license:
Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 3.0 Unported.

2. Matthias Kabel. CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

3. Establish a framework to work
collectively with waste.

4. Basurama: a framework for
designing collectively with waste
April 3rd 2013
Pablo Rey Mazón. Basurama.
Cultural Agents Initiative and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative

5. Waste is a powerful
affordable resource.
Working collectively requires:
Listening to the others needs
Taking time, location, material
constrains in account

6. Basura = trash
ama = love
-orama = wide view of
Basurama = wide view of + love trash

7. 1. What is waste?
2. What can we do with waste?
3. How to work collaboratively with waste?

8. 1. What is waste?
Natural resources that have been wasted.

9. Waste is a resource in the wrong place.

10. Things that have lost their name.
“The process by which something is turned into trash can be
described as a process of disqualification: things turn into trash
when their service makes them lose the properties that described
them as these or those things, and so on and so forth, and turn only
into that "thingness", fluid and without attributes, that accumulates
in trash tips and whose regeneration depends, we could say, on
acquiring their lost properties again”.
José Luis Pardo

11. Whatever is tagged as waste.
#Waste

12. Whatever is tagged as waste.
#Waste

13. Whatever is tagged as waste.
#Waste

14. Whatever is tagged as waste.
#Waste

15. Whatever is tagged as waste.
#Waste

16. "Through the garbage collection system of
Mexico City it is possible to make an accurate
radiograph of the entire political system of the
republic, its power relations, their corrupt
situations, etc.."
Héctor Castillo Berthier
Waste is information.

17. "Through the garbage collection system of
Mexico City it is possible to make an accurate
radiograph of the entire political system of the
republic, its power relations, their corrupt
situations, etc.."
Héctor Castillo Berthier
Waste is information.

18. Recycling
vs
Upcycling/downcycling

19. Recycling
vs
Reduce Reuse
Recovery Repair
Rehabilitation

20. Waste is a relative concept.
Waste doesn't exist.
Waste has many scales/sizes/shapes.

21. Waste = People that work with waste

23. Waste picker, Cambridge MA, 2010

24. 1. What is waste?
2. What can we do with waste?
3. Working collaboratively with waste?

25. 2. What can we do with waste?
A. Analyze + Visualize
B. Reuse

26. A. Analyze + Visualize
Multimedia approach: from objects to landscape
Trash Safari. Madrid, 2005

27. You are what you throw away. Benicassim, Spain. 2007

28. You are what you throw away. Benicassim, 2007 with Iris Giménez Gil

29. Waste Packaging Index. Berlin, 2012 with Dietmar Offenhuber

30. Packaging
Waste Packaging Index (WPI) =
Total Weight of the product
Waste Packaging Index. Berlin, 2012

31. Waste Packaging Index. Berlin, 2012

32. How to visualize Madrid's Big Dig?
I ♥ M30. Madrid 2006 (Yo amo M30, with Areaciega and Sauro Pixels

33. Video trailer YO amo M30 http://youtu.be/hCpepJFR8rE
I ♥ M30. Madrid 2006

34. I ♥ M30. Madrid 2006

35. I ♥ M30. Madrid 2006. Video trailer 2 http://youtu.be/n7Y48k8TrV8

36. 6000km.org. 2006-2012

37. Urb. Francisco Hernández. Seseña, Toledo.
Ciduad de Valdeluz. Guadalajara, Spain.

39. 6000km.org + meipi.org/6000km 2006-2011

40. 6000km.org 2006-2011

41. PAU Ensanche de Vallecas.

42. PAU Ensanche de Vallecas.

43. PAU Ensanche de Vallecas. 2013

45. PAU Ensanche de Vallecas. 2013

47. PAU Ensanche de Vallecas.

49. Weymouth. MA. USA

51. http://mapknitter.org/maps/saugus-incinerator-landfill

52. http://basurama.org/transtrash/2011/10/19/saugus-ash-landfill-map/

53. http://basurama.org/transtrash/

58. http://meipi.org/cambridgewaste

60. B. Reuse
Reusing materials
and public space

61. Juego Chachi. Leandro Lattes. 2005

62. Juego Chachi. Leandro Lattes. 2005

63. Spermöla = Yard sale in public space
Spermöla 2004, 2005, 2006

64. Spermöla 2004, 2005, 2006

66. Free Shop.
Manresa, Spain. 2010

67. Free Shop.
Manresa, Spain. 2010

74. 3. Working collaboratively with waste?

75. RUS RESIDUOS URBANOS SÓLIDOS
URBAN SOLID WASTE

76. RUS
A series of chained projects developed by
Basurama and the local cultural-social
collaborators of every iteration of the project.
Every time the project ended with an action or
intervention in the public space, usually
degraded, and was centered in working urban
waste (Basurama 2011).
Funded by the Spanish Agency for International
Development Cooperation (AECID) through the
Red de Centros Culturales de la Cooperación
Española in Latin America.

78. Timeline of a RUS project
1. Research trip
-Materials
-Techniques and tools
-Intervention spaces
-Urban conflicts
-Contact local agents: artists, neighbors, municipality.
2. Review information and pre-design
-Establish a local main collaborator
3. Intervention trip
-Production: materials, tools.
-Design and co-design: iterations depending on
negotiations, materials and actors
-Construction: Workshop and prototype with locals
-Action/intervention/installation
-Unmount.

79. RUS is based on:
-Reactivation of public space
-Local community
-Waste
-Reuse

80. Public Space
-In danger/threaten
-Inadequate or poor maintenance
-Privatization
-Lack of use
-Abandondment

81. Local Community
-Wide range of stakeholders
-Different involvement:
punctual support to full
Involvement

82. Waste
-Source of information
-Low cost
-Location: harvest map
-Value vs Price

83. Reuse
Ubiquity of industrialized products

84. RUS Asunción. Paraguay. 2008 with Sonia Carísimo and Francisco Tomboly

85. RUS Asunción. Paraguay. 2008 with Sonia Carísimo and Francisco Tomboly

86. RUS Asunción + Varsaw 2010

87. Varsaw 2010

88. RUS Buenos Aires. Todos somos cartoneros (We are all waste pickers) 2009

89. RUS Buenos Aires. Guide to create cooperatives. With Eloisa Cartonera.

90. RUS Buenos Aires. Guide to create cooperatives. With Eloisa Cartonera.

91. La ciudad de los niños. Cabanyal, Valencia (2009) with Arquitectura se mueve.

92. RUS Córdoba. Tejedoras Urbanas (Urban knitters) (2009) with Quinua Photos: Quinua

93. RUS Córdoba. Tejedoras Urbanas (Urban knitters) (2009) with Quinua

94. Video: Juan Andres Mancuello http://youtu.be/v3uM1cNpOMc

95. RUS Córdoba. Tejedoras Urbanas (Urban knitters) (2009) with Quinua

97. RUS Mexico City. 2008

100. Car Tires

103. RUS LIMA
SELF MADE AMUSEMENT “GHOST
TRAIN” PARK

104. Initial research

105. Harvest map

107. Uncompleted Metropolitan railway.
Foto: Sara Fernández Deustch

108. “El Tren fantasma” (ghost train)
-Elevated metropolitan railway project
-Started construction in 1986
-Opened 10km in 1990.
-For 20 years abandoned elevated
infrastructure.
-Promised public transportation system
that never arrived.

111. Collaborators
-Christians Luna (visual artist)
-Sandra Nakamura (visual artist)
-Camila Bustamante (graphic designer)
-El Cartón (architecture students collective)
-C.H.O.L.O. (artist collective based on Lima suburbs)
-El Cartón (architecture students collective)
-Playstationvagon (graffiti writers/urban artists)
-El Codo (graffiti writer/urban artist)
-Motivando Corazones collective (non profit
organization)
-María Pía Raschio and Diego Alonso -Rossell (artist)
-Local group of boy scouts
-Surquillo District Municipality

112. RUS Lima, Peru. 2010

113. RUS Lima, Peru. 2010

115. Aucahuasi. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tren_Eléctrico_viaducto_inconcluso.jpg

116. C.H.O.L.O.

117. Parque Autoarmable (Self made playground)
“Nueva Esperanza” in Pachacutec, Ventanilla.
Developed by C.H.O.L.O., Christians Luna y
the community of sector C1 de Pachacutec
Photos: C.H.O.L.O.

118. Parque Autoarmable Nueva Esperanza. Lima
Photos: C.H.O.L.O.

119. … and now, what's going on in Basurama?

120. Long term involvement.
Autobarrios. San Cristobal de los Ángeles, Madrid. 2013

121. Real estate bubble in São Paulo. Brazil. 2013