Tue Greenfort, Arts & Ecology commission project

In April 2005 the Royal Society of Arts in partnership with Arts Council England launched Arts & Ecology, a programme aiming to examine and address environmental concerns in the international arena. Between 2005 and 2010, the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre explored the practice of artists, writers, architects and film-makers through a series of conferences, commissions and publications looking at local and global projects that attempted to communicate, challenge and propose solutions to pollution, waste and loss of natural habitats.

Latitudes was invited to curate a commission for London and invited Danish artist Tue Greenfort to develop a public project focusing on the city's ecological and social systems. Following several site-visits and a residency period in London in 2007 (see chronology of the commission below), Greenfort's project was presented coinciding with his participation in the 2008 edition of Frieze Art Fair projects where his new sculpture was sited immediately outside the exit ramp of the Fair in Regent’s Park.

Greenfort’s sculpture consisted of three 1100 litre standard Eurobins (the familiar street refuse containers otherwise known as “wheelie bins”) whose sides had been cut away and replaced with windows of clear polycarbonate, thus making their contents visible to everyone. It created a grand though rudimentary behavioural experiment in which citizens generated a transparent reflection on consumption, disposability and recent municipal waste incentives, at the point where personal assets were thrown away. Importantly, although the bins were encountered within close proximity to a major art event, they were not visibly framed as art works. No plinth, no label and no sign indicated that they were anything other than functional bins, plausibly located where one was leaving the event, perhaps ready to shed unwanted detritus.