Recycling is not a new concept, the industry retires, reuses, or enhances metals and other wastes.Isn't the current green trend drilling enough into us the great necessity to care for the only planet that hosts and feeds us freely?
With the REHAB exhibit, The EDF (Electricity of France) Espace foundation challenges us to renew the debate with fresh actors: The Artists. Their interpretations, visions, testimonies and surprising ideas are managed on three levels, transforming and bending what we throw, what we disregard, into Art and sometimes Master Pieces.

Greeted by the leafy shadow of an ancient palmtree tire that relates in an instant the story of a natural material transformed, used, wore out and then thrown away as it becomes polluting. The artist transform the material back as a rebirth and gives it back its noble and natural aspect. Will this piece from Douglas White produce a fruit??
As much as the exhibit offers a fresh viewpoint on our wastes' life, Steve Lyons knows just one viewpoint : His camera's. From a conglomerate of objects sitting there in an anarchique way, a camera sends us back via the screen a more than realist outcome, optical illusion, digital mirage...It doesn't matter. A reflection on yesterday's and tomorrow's images, made up for us, the viewers, that we look at without really seeing..Trash TV?
On the underground the swiss Christian Gonzenbach takes apart and graze our dear electric appliances .Their colored skins laying there, looking like Cheyenne trophees after a successful hunt.
A derivation on the values where we don't use out of necessity any more, but more for entertainement or passion!
Invertedly Michael Samuels rebuilds. Visions and clashing objects, colorful, playful, like a Mondrian a little drunk and a little broke, nothing matches but everything fits. A revisitation of our waste through the pop culture, a matter of taste and colors.
Lucie Chaumont chooses to integrate the molds and enhances the packaging of her consumption since 2006. Indelible and growing print of a young woman of her time in her day to day, like a tense mirror. Considering the longevity of plastic (450 years for some), we can bet that future archeology will have a real field day.
On the first floor we are drawn by the mystery and the oneiric magic of the forrest, coming out of old card boards and of a precise chiseling, the patient work of Eva Jospin. trompe l'oeil all in Clair /Obscure, underwood secrets. Poetic contrast and natural turn of event.
In the movie department Los Super Elegantes mimics a modern tale as a musical/telenovelas on an end of the century euro-danse background. « Sixteen » or the love affairs tribulations of a future time hero..The waste man!!The waste man who is precisely the main caracter of the movie « Touch Sanitation », a movie by american historic green artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles . Amazing testimony of the existing system allowing a city like New York to avoid being buried under its own trash.
In the same line of thought « Fresh Kill », crumpled metal sheets and gigantic waste land. Gordon Matta-Clark shoots the slow destruction of his own car, symbolic and cult object in America, by bulldozers and under the protesting screams of the seaguls.
It's hard to brush up the whole picture of the REHAB exhibition and those 18 artists that offer our waste and our vision more than a second life, also a second chance. Let's hope that the word Trash remains an insult and doesn't become a raw material in a near future. or those who missed it, maybe they'll do it again....