NO!W
ACROSS
LAB
The founder of Give to Gift-NO!W Youth Project Yang Fang-Yi invited calligrapher Chang Chia-Ju and environmental activist Heidi Chen to found the NO!W Across Lab. With the core concept of “non-trash”and “cross-village” as main action to truly act on and in the base of “lab”, discussing the many faces and positive possibilities of the issue “waste”.
The idea of creating a lab together started from 2015, when Yang Fang-Yi and Heidi Chen participated in Bamboo Curtain Studio’s “Green Art Action” exhibition, seeing how a group of Taiwanese and Thai artists created art with inspirations from daily life and their surroundings, shared experiences on art without borders and precious stories of rivers motivated them to make change and protects the mother earth. In 2016, Chang Chia-Ju’s collaboration with Beautiful Taiwan Association – “Hai Na Bai Chuan” (the great tolerance and liberality) floral flag-work exhibition, integrated traditional calligraphy with unused advertisement flags to present how an individual performs an active role in the immense web of humanity and society. In 2017, Yan Fang-Yi and Chang Chia-Ju co-curated “Come and Dine, A Hundred Dish with Classic Tastes” creative flag-work exhibition, showing the inspiration they took from nearby U-mkt citizens’ daily lives, mapping a culturescape from Taiwan’s floriculture to dining culture and fuse the “Ban De” (banquet-holding) tradition into environmental artworks – presenting how culture turns global warming into heart-warming art practices.
The residency plan takes on four stages: cross-meeting, cross-interaction, cross-creating and cross-discovering. Through heterogeneous weaving, traditional calligraphy, reused creation and cross-disciplinary collaboration in an environment that’s in contradiction between fast-culture and nostalgia, we start from the first stage “cross-meeting”, with the residency acting as an experiment space to observe the treasure hill residences “arrive”, “leave” and “live”; to see and research their perspective on the cross-relationship of “new and old”, “together and scatter” and “traditional and modern”.
The second stage, we expect to invite residences in-and outside the village or creators and practitioners (theatre, dance, science, literature, mathematics, biology...etc.) to come to the lab and join the stage of cross-interaction , to provide and document their thoughts on the definition of the “waste” issue and how can we redefine it; moreover, to co-create a small production on-site based on what we have discussed (waste in exchange, waste in reuse, food waste in reuse) and thus finish off the third stage.
In the last stage, we hope to invite people to join us in the display of “no-waste in action” and to cross-discover the possibilities of doing “no-waste” individually and as a group under the influence of social and environmental change, to bring to a close to our four-staged sustainability co-create project.
