Recycle for the sake of art

Recycle has discovered in social networks features of a brand-new social system, with its own laws, customs and rituals.

Last time they were exhibited in Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. (Pictured is the head of the museum Olga Sviblova)

Recycle’s first solo exhibition took place in Moscow at M’ARS Centre for Contemporary Arts in 2008. It has had seven solo shows since then. Their works were exhibited in such large group projects as Russian Povera (Perm Museum for Contemporary Art, Perm; ARTPLAY Centre for Design and Architecture, Moscow); Dior: Under the Sign of Art (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow); Conservation, a public art project in New Holland (St. Petersburg); Glasstress, a parallel program of the 54th Venice Biennale; and Futurology (Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow).

Andrey Blokhin (born 1987, Krasnodar) and Georgy Kuznetsov (born 1985, Stavropol) graduated from the Krasnodar State Academy of Culture and Arts in 2010. They live and work in Krasnodar.

"At some point, our materials began to change, and we started to get a feel for them. And when you begin managing the material, rather than it manage you, you go to a new substantive level, because you know exactly how to do it," - says the members of Recycle group.

How the plastic netting appeared among Recycle's materials? As the Recycle members recall, they literally had stopped at a supermarket and accidentally saw it there. Then they tried melting it with a hair dryer, which was basically a strange thing to do, but it worked for them.

The first works of the Recycle Art Group were made from plastic and styrofoam. The authors didn’t have a lot of money, so they just took materials that were available and attempted to obtain certain visual qualities.

And it is not just a matter of memory, but indeed of eternal life. None of the data entered in Facebook is deleted, and sometimes the pages of users who vanished long ago continue to send messages. One of the principal symbols of this world and its inhabitants is, of course, the letter "F", the first letter of the word Facebook.

There is an old stereotypical opposition between material and spiritual substances, but the realities of today life show us that there is a third dimension. It is neither material nor spiritual, and yet it promises the individual — or rather, his or her «profile» — eternal life by adopting the functions of religion.

Paradise Network, however, represents a new turn in Recycle’s work - from the recycling of classical artworks and archaeological projections of the present into the future to an appropriation of virtual reality.

In Paradise Network project as in Cultural Layer, the main question is what from our time will survive in history.

Previous project, Cultural Layer, paved the way of the current project about the modern miracle of the social network, in which the authors saw features of a brand new social system, with its own laws, customs and rituals.

In its new project, Paradise Network, Recycle continues to reflect on what our time will leave behind for future generations, what artifacts archaeologists will find after we are gone, and whether these artifacts will find their place in the cultural layer.

With help of the Recycle Group, car tires, waste containers, wires, drinking straws, plastic bags, and broken gadgets have received a second life in museums and galleries.

Winner of the 2010 Kandinsky Prize in the category “Young Artist: Project of the Year,” Recycle Art Group (Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov) is already quite familiar to art and ecology lovers. They are able to turn things that seem to be just rubbish into real art objects.