Hereafter and its consequent research question were born around thoughts based on the role of God, who plays the supreme creator of life and death above all living beings adapting this concept to the daily life of consumption materials.
This project investigates an alternative way of defeating what we came to think it is the natural order of things: life (the function or purpose of stuff) - and death ( the end of the purpose of stuff, disposability, uselessness – waste) by creating a platform that challenges the established assumptions around waste, in a conceptual way: a visual metaphor, using science as a visual vehicle to show something we weren’t able or avoided to see and what we are responsible for: waste.
And I also believe that if human beings cannot all understand science, or religion or life and death, they do tend to understand or ‘feel’ art. Therefore, that artists are responsible for changing consciousness. To challenge, to question, to propose and to provoke.
Hereafter was created by Bárbara Moura in 2012, as the
official project of her MA APPLIED IMAGINATION IN THE CREATIVE INDUSTRIES, at
Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London.
The aim was to create an artistic platform combining
arts and science to challenge general assumptions around the under rated value
of waste, and the modern disease of 'Everything is disposable'.
Addressing the following research question: How can
artists use digital technology to give waste an afterlife?
When Barbara met Filipe Almeida, a Phd student in
Materials Science at Queen Mary's University, the doors of the scientific
sphere that Hereafter needed to quick off, unfolded.
Barbara has been collecting her daily personal waste,
and along with Filipe, and the miraculous digital technology of SEM ( Scanning
Electron Microscope) they have been creating an image database of the unknown
and fascinating life of day to day rubbish.
The main goal is that the images of each object will
be forwarded to artists collaborating in the project, that will create a one
off piece based on one waste object, in a sort of conceptual alchemy, turning
rubbish into art.
The project counts already with 10 artists producing work in Illustration, Collage, Graphic Design, Photography and Fashion Design.
The outcome will be an exhibition featured on
Barbara's Degree Show in the first week of December at Central Saint Martins, which will also function as a simulation of
a birth of an artistic movement, and as an intervention that invites artists to
defeat pre established ideas that should be re-estructured in the modern age,
such as the judgement of certain values.
This campaign aims to collect funds to bring the exhibition up to life, to print and frame some of the final pieces, to print the official Hereafter's booklets, and to all sort of exhibition materials, and renting technological equipment.