Garbage or Art?

Artist Susanna Kumschick, along with the lighting design team, Luzinterruptius, partnered together to design and create Plastic Garbage Guarding the Museum. The art piece was part of the Oh Plastiksack! exhibit at the Gewerbemusem in Switzerland. The exhibit is a 4 month artistic exploration of waste in society with the focus on plastic bags as the art medium

Oh Plastiksack! points out how in regards to consumer behavior, plastic bags are a symbol of advertise, identity, and status and explores the how society views garbage. It forces the viewer to take something that is a social stigma of filth and contamination and to see it as art that is alluring and meaningful.
 
Oh Plastiksack! also explores the relationship of society and the environment with the presence of waste in everyday life as well as the cultural use of using and disgarding. To encourage recycling, Gewerbemuseum gave free admission into the museum to those who donated recycled plastic bags to the museum. The museum collected 5,000 bags that were used for the exhibit.

Plastic Garbage Guarding the Museum was designed with change in mind and to look best at the beginning of the exhibit with the anticipation of it looking "dicrepit" at the end of the exhibit. The significance of the installation is in "how it will evolve with time and how the public will react" to the changes. For this reason, the designers chose to place the installation outdoors at the entrance of the museum.

The Oh Plastiksack! exhibit is a powerful testimony of how everyday items that typically become garbage, can be transformed into something beautiful.