Find the Garbage Shop exhibition in the Educatorium Restaurant

11 November 2019

The Garbage Shop is a collection of works made from waste collected after the Canal Pride Utrecht, by Janneke Kornet. See the world of street waste through her eyes as you examine relics of ferocious consumerism in the Anthropocene, now in the Educatorium Restaurant!

You will find the Garbage Shop in the Educatorium Restaurant, just as you pass the cashiers

See the world of street waste through the eyes of artist, Janneke Kornet

Following Utrecht Canal Pride 2019, a plogging run was held by the Green Office to help clear the streets of litter and simultaneously offer everyone some healthy exercise. The waste that we picked up during this run makes up the exhibition that you can now find in the Educatorium Restaurant.

In her creative process, Kornet was inspired by the epoch of fierce consumerism in the Anthropocene era, which provides a foreground on which all of our lives are painted. Through this art, Kornet hints to the bitter reality of the present. On the other hand, her work has given this waste a second life, and feeds the dialogue around our relationship to it.

Some examples of the exhibited items

Some products, such as the series of Spa bottles (on the left), have been meticulously cleaned and restored, and refer to the previous role which these bottles held. That is, as marketing tools for their brand, and not just containers. Other items in the exhibition include new products.

For example, the Sweet Micro Confetti (on the right). These confetti were made from candy wrappers which were discarded on the street, after a cheeky moment shared between passers-by and their short sugary escape.

If these wrappers had not been picked up, they would eventually have been absorbed into nature, and broken down into increasingly tiny particles of microplastic. Microplastics are defined as plastic particles of 5 mm or less, about the size of one piece of confetti.

The most striking piece of the exhibition, 5 Gyres (see below) shows a world map with the main hotspots within which our plastic waste accumulates. The 20 most polluting rivers are embroidered on the map.