OBJECTS
To display in the kiosk’s windows and to furnish our precarious kitchen, living
and sleeping rooms, we got objects from mainly two sources: the Sozialkaufhaus
Möbilé, a non-profit organization and second hand store, commonly known as the
Weimarer Tafel, and the Feira de São Joaquim, a historical and popular market of
regional products, located on the coast line of Salvador’s bay. These two
choices had strategic conceptual reasons concerning the histories of Weimar and
Salvador: they both have created a kind of multi-layered dialogue between these
respective cities’ symbolic daily practices. This choice intended to question
hegemonic routes and brands in the culture of consumption by collaborating with
informal economies and investigating how the trade value of their objects
shifted when placing them in other contexts.
RESOURCES
Weimar: The Sozialkaufhaus Möbilé is a social institution selling second hands
objects, collected from donations, for very modest prices. It is located in a
warehouse on the western outskirts of Weimar and difficult to access by public
transportation. This institution is managed by the Diakonie foundation, a German
Christian association concerned with a wide range of social support services. It
is by now the only permanent source for used objects in the city. The Sperrmüll,
a regulated public service for collecting old furniture and electro-domestics by
depositing them on the sidewalk, is a very common practice in Germany. It used
to be carried out on a systematic basis and allowed a recycling culture to
remain alive. Every street would become a sort of open free market for used
objects twice a year. There was a list of streets and dates available in the
city hall, and people could easily research and collect objects they liked and/or
needed. The recent alteration of this public service (now inhabitants have to
make individual appointments for the city to pick up, or individually bring
their old furniture to either the Möbilé or directly to the selected waste
disposal), two years after the opening of IKEA in a neighboring city,
contributed to consolidating the transition of consumption patterns from the
former recycled-reused-repaired especially current in GDR times, to globalized
capitalism. Still, Sperrmüll is used widely and also constituted one of our main
resources.
Salvador: Feira de São Joaquim is the main distribution market of products
directly connected to the popular culture of the city, occupying a large area of
the eastern coast of All Saints Bay. Historically, it used to operate at the
central docks, but due to renewals of the harbor and the market’s unplanned
growth, it was moved to its current location in the São Joaquim inlet. This
place converges a series of informal networks of production and distribution of
regional products: herbs, fruits, manioc flour and sun-dried meat, utilitarian
wood and straw handcrafts, and, among other things, various religious artifacts
and implements, even live animals. Many of these are symbolic objects intimately
connected to the modes of production of subjectivity in the region, and in
Salvador in particular. Salvador is a city that has a vibrant rhythm, expressed
daily in its streets: rituals, dances, offerings and live music are part of
urban life. The street vending culture fills up the sidewalks with an active
bartering atmosphere, where body contact is almost inevitable. For the sake of
the project, and in contrast to the sterility and cleanliness of Weimar’s public
spaces, we chose Feira de São Joaquim to be the main provider of objects from
Brazil for our trade and usage in Weimar.
