At first glance, waste and art are two radically opposed notions. The first represents what man strives to hide and destroy, while the second designates what he seeks to sublimate. sTo Len disagrees. The multimedia artist recently embarked on a initiative questioning our approach to wasteas part of his residency with the New York City Sanitation Department (DSNY).
The “Office of (In) Visibility” project includes a series of behind-the-scenes videos of garbage collection in New York City. sTo Len had the idea to create them after finding film reels under a sink in the sanitation department. “I was surprised to find that the sanitation department had a print studio and a television studio, with all those obsolete archival materials.“, he explained to The Art Newspaper.
No one has watched these films for decades, but they are extremely valuable; more than the story of sanitation, they tell the story of New York itself.
One of the videos included in “Office of (In) Visibility” shows archival footage of the garbage collectors’ strike that rocked New York in February 1968. At the end of these nine days of protest, nearly 100,000 tonnes of household waste piled up in the streets of the American city.
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