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The RRRRR Trash Festival at P.S. Kensington
Whippersnapper Gallery’s summer programming series, “Take Me With You,” has been all about exploring the implications of reusing trash. This past Sunday, the gallery marked the culmination of that series by using trash, and nothing but trash (well, and a fridge full of beer, and several bands) to throw a free party in Kensington Market, during Pedestrian Sunday. It was great. You should have been there. Maybe you were there. If not, here are pictures. And a short recap, after the jump.
The “RRRRR Trash Festival,” as the event was known, took place in a dirt parking lot in the rear of the El Gordo latin food court, at 214 Augusta Avenue. Part of the parking lot serves as a kind of outdoor eating area for El Gordo’s customers, and so there were plenty of people who had wandered in just to eat their pupusas, and instead found themselves in the midst of a thick crowd of mostly youngish people, gathered in front of a giant sculpture of a phoenix made of garbage by the Brazilian collective Urban Trash Art, while a statue of Chinese artist (and recently released political prisoner) Ai Wei Wei, constructed entirely out of scraps of scavenged cardboard boxes and packing tubes by street artist Sean Martindale, smiled down upon the proceedings. The scene looked like some kind of post-apocalyptic ritual site, but with port-a-potties.
Whippersnapper had somehow managed to secure a permit to serve beer out of a corner of a fairly decrepit garage shunted off to one side of the parking lot, and so everyone was drinking $4 cans of Steam Whistle. In the other corner was a stage backdrop of clouds and stars made out of white cardboard, where the band Yamantaka Sonic Titan, who can only be described as a sort of Sino-Japanese facepaint art-punk outfit, played a blistering set to a sweaty crowd.
The high point of the afternoon was when the Lemon Bucket Orkestra, a local Ukrainian folk band with like twelve members and a penchant for playing impromptu parties on street corners, marched into the parking lot, and mounted a ladder onto the roof of an adjoining building (even the tuba player!), where they played a few songs before moving to the stage inside the garbage phoenix’s wings. The crowd did a lot of dancing, despite the heat. And so now we know what this decade’s nascent party phenomenon is: traditional Ukrainian music, accordion-heavy.
For possibly the first time in Pedestrian Sunday history, some effort at crowd control was necessary. After the parking lot hit capacity, two guys by the entrance of the alleyway started enforcing a lineup.
In short, Whippersnapper managed to throw a fun, inclusive, free (except for the beer) party on a shoestring budget, in a venue they made themselves, with scenecraft made mostly of stuff they found in alleyways and in dumpsters, and they managed to imply something about the virtue of reuse in the process. This is how you have good times in a recession, under a conservative government. You use what’s available.
Photos courtesy of the Whippersnapper Gallery.