SuperReuse

MINIFESTO

This platform is concerned with the exploration and adaptation of matter that can be considered, outdated, redundant or obsolete: material that has lost its value, resources that are considered waste, stuff that is considered expendable has been discarded and is considered surplus. These processes of depredation may have been enacted through economic, value-based processes, or by extraordinary one-off means such as fire, flood and devastation. All situations have in common the proposition that an obsolete environment or element, is not only a site of depredation, it is a condition for mediation, and the site of the enactment of research and design processes that will ensure that meaningful change through reuse will take place. Reuse participants are obsessed with adapting the unwanted, the discarded and the no longer fit-for-purpose. They are fascinated with determining new life in objects and spaces that are often considered to be spoil.

PROJECT TITLE: THE RUIN

Reusers are always dealing with ruins in some form or other. Ruins are paradoxes, embodying all kinds of meanings through acting as portals that oscillate between the past and the future. It is this fluctuation between the tangible material in front of us and what was once there, that is the primary force of the ruin: it requires us to imagine and engage in the tensions between the existing and what it might become.

18th century ordnance surveys reveal no building on land enclosed in the small village of Nettleham, just a few miles north-east of Lincoln. A building appeared on the site from around 1815, added to in successive renovations and enclosed from the road by gates salvaged from St Peters church in Lincoln. Throughout the 18th and nineteenth centuries the house was extensively adapted for the hood family: descendants of whom still own the site today. In 1937 the house was burnt down and the ruined house has slowly been consumed by nature.

This project required its participants to explore and address fundamental issues of value in the existing. Its starting points were to form value judgements with regards to this ruin. Ruins are the waste of systems of power, economics, culture. Reusers absorb and channel this material for their transformation. We can be nostalgic and we may lust but the ruin must always provoke us into action in order to determine its future(s).