At the beginning, ReSources unfolded as a shapeless project that sought nothing more than to research the idea of waste.
What is waste? While the question will always be relevant, ReSources wants us to also ask ourselves what isn’t waste.
After a first decade [2015-2025] studying waste in its material, immaterial, symbolic, and conceptual realms, from the obvious to the profound, ReSources currently reaches certain maturity through its practical and applied research as well as a theoretical and academic body.
Appealing to the freedom within the broad spectrum of waste, ReSources encompasses trash, the ordinary, the invisible, the discarded, the unwanted, the hidden, filth, danger, excess, imperfection, the useless, impurity, taboo, pollution, and so on. At the same time, with the artistic openness to work in diverse media such as installation, photography, poster, typography, performance, assemblage, painting, and ready-made, among others, materializing in diverse contexts such as galleries, public, academic and private spaces, and new media.
ReSources, then, seeks to open paths to facilitate accessibility and the transition toward a sustainable future, while acting as a creative catalyst. Waste, sustainability, and creativity, in short, cohabit here in a symbiotic relationship, sometimes serving as bridges, sometimes as axes.
Current exhibition in Santiago, Chile
Current exhibition in Santiago, Chile
7-29th May 2025
Cava Gallery, Palacio Cousiño Museum, Santiago, Chile
An exhibition by Quiénes Somos and ReSources
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Who are you?
What is waste?
The first is the question that gives life to Quiénes Somos continually opening traces of the collective based on individual identities.
The second is the seed that gives rise to ReSources as it is an idea that pursues new limits on the value of things, of what we have and what we don´t.
Both projects began a collaboration in 2021, which will see the publication of their work through Selección Descarte [Selection Discard], an audiovisual essay that emerges from the intersection of their subjects of study.
In this context, Quiénes Somos and ReSources offer an exhibition that allows visitors to contextualize themselves in the vanishing point, journey, and vision of each project, in a free and interdependent manner, while also presenting an interest in discovering new points of convergence, meaning, and expansion.
Who you are and what waste means to you are questions we understand to be both important and urgent today, a time when we openly ask ourselves whether the answer to one can actually exist independently of the other.
Upcoming.
Granada, Spain.
Objet trouvé, acrylic, assemblage, installation.
October 17th to November 16th 2025. Serie N 01
intentos de círculo [circle attempts], collective exhibition at Casa de Zafra where ReSources will exhibit Serie N 01.
Archive.
Santiago, Chile and Granada, Spain.
Objet trouvé, acrylic, assemblage, installation.
Serie N was born from El alma y sus afecciones: la salud mental desde el legado médico y filosófico andalusí, a doctoral study by Jimena German [Mexico] from the University of Granada, who asked a few Latin American artists to do an artistic transference.
Here, ReSources delves directly into an immaterial dimension of waste, that of an internal pollutant and generator of interference as well as an obstruction, presenting the idea that waste exists on an internal level, also, and that it must also be addressed, managed and purified so as not to cloud the environment.
The piece Serie N 01 will be exhibited from October 17th to November 16th at Casa de Zafra [Granada, Spain], as part of the collective exhibition intentos de círculo.
Las Ventanas, Chile.
Audiovisual essay.
As the first collaboration between Quiénes Somos and ReSources, this audiovisual essay, filmed in Las Ventanas, a well-known sacrifice zone in Puchuncaví, chooses to engage in a dialogue between the familiar artistic medium of Quiénes Somos, video, and one of ReSources’ theoretical foundations, defamiliarization.
The guiding theme of Selección Descarte is intersected by two questions that recur throughout the work of the two projects: “Who are you?”, from Quiénes Somos, and “What is waste?”, from ReSources.
Würzburg, Germany.
Photography, typography, poster.
With its research in Würzburg, Germany, ReSources opens up the possibility of shifting the focus of the study of waste and expanding the role of the garbage dump in relation to waste.
This, a firewall and container, isolates, renders invisible, and protects not only waste but also its meanings, distancing us from its state of impurity and keeping us away from the conflict generated by waste in contact with humans. By designing a fully functional typeface of this nature, it allows everyone to control and create by using what a garbage bin is to what it contains: ideas.
Zanzibar, Tanzania.
Performance, analog photography, website.
In Zanzibar, Tanzania, waste was understood in its polluting dimension, through its interaction with water and the flooding that parts of the island face year after year, and how this played a preponderant role in the normal development of its inhabitants. This brought the concept of delay, or delay accumulator, from systems thinking, an exercise presented as performance, research, analog photography, and exhibition on its own website, permanently online.
Unmanaged waste clogs drainage systems, and these clog [delays] people’s lives, which is what the online exhibition seeks to offer visitors an optional, yet deliberate, experience.
Helsinki, Finland.
Thesis at Aalto University.
Over material waste, defamiliarization and creativity this thesis underlies an investigation that merges around and converges into the concept of creative accessibility. Permanently layering around alienation, value and the idea of forcing, this thesis intends to dissect How does material waste defamiliarization through artistic means catalyze creativity?
Waste, in this thesis understood as trash and as everyday aesthetics, is utterly recognized as a problem thus this investigation unfolds fundamental cracks in this problematic perspective. Instead, it proposes an argumentative line that offers new lights in harmony with waste, through artistic defamiliarization as a bridge and ultimately a creative catalyst. Furthermore a departure position to delve inside the creative body through two dimensions that are permanently identified, separated and put together back and forth. One, creativity as problem solving and two, creativity as something else.
Helsinki, Finland.
Sculpture, object, objet trouvé, installation.
Three projects create ReSources’ journey through Finland. During this period, each project developed a unique narrative, as well as an artistic medium and source of waste, as usual.
Tomato 6 describes the visible and invisible nature of production processes, in this case, of greenhouse tomatoes. Plastic Ball focuses on the possibility of play as an alternative route toward new sustainable futures, as a valid way to achieve environmental regeneration and the harmony of postmodern humans. And on [off] wisdom, for its part, encompasses the validity of accepted sources of knowledge, one of which is research and traditionally accepted sources of information, and nature itself, as a school of another code, but a school nonetheless.
Santiago, Chile.
Objet trouvé, workshop, installation.
Now in Chile, ReSources takes the participatory methodology practiced in the previous project in Nepal as a foundation and formalizes it as a remote and in-person workshop, both theoretical and experiential, developed with the special collaboration of Gustavo Zamorano. With workshop participants ranging in age from 20 to 70, and from diverse professions such as students, entrepreneurs, artists, architects, and psychologists, both Chilean and international, we tried to achieve the necessary versatility to bring diverse points of view.
We worked on the ideas of sustainability and creativity, again, as well as the problem of commercial waste such as the wooden fruit and vegetable crates typical in markets. The sculptural installation was presented as a way to address the limits of the useful and the useless, and what is the role that artistic reuse should play.
Kathmandu, Nepal.
Objet trouvé, workshop, sculpture.
In its second intervention, ReSources, along with a group of students, tried a format based on project-based learning and artistic environmental education, alongside students from Olympia World School and Tribhuvan University.
Using a chronology that sought to contextualize what we think about creativity and what we think about sustainability, respectively, we as a group aimed to build an hourglass. This would allow us to create a connection between the idea of resources and its relationship with time, which is finite and constantly evolving. For this sculpture, we used waste collected from public streets, from the Nepal Art Council, and from a groupal waste collection.
Milan, Italy.
Objet trouvé, installation.
This first project was based on the collection [accumulation] of recyclable and non-recyclable household waste, with the idea building something, actually useless, free from any commitment. As the volume of waste increased, the conclusion was drawn that each waste item would be better served as a larger whole, and that, ignoring the parts of the sum, it would only see the sum.
In 2017, seeking to open a dialogue about the relationship between human animals and nature, and with the cooperation of the Municipality of Milan, ReSources was born, taking shape as an installation at Spazio Ex Fornace, a local gallery, using as a device the idea of making the ordinary extraordinary, an ethos that would be there for some time, but not forever.