Branded Trash: (In)voluntary Product Displacement - Iteration #4 - City-wide Exhibition in Gorizia
Branded Trash explores the intersection of consumer culture, advertising, and waste, focusing on how branded litter scattered across city streets or rural areas becomes an involuntary and omnipresent form of advertising. The project photographs various types of discarded objects branded with corporate logos, challenging viewers to reconsider the invisibility of waste in urban spaces and highlighting a paradox: even trash, before being elevated to the status of billboards, serves as genuine advertising.
By subtly integrating itself into the urban landscape, the exhibition blurs the lines between public space, advertising, and art, aiming to provoke reflection among passersby on the roles of consumers and companies in the waste cycle.
This iteration will be spread throughout the city, starting on 4th October 2024 and culminating between 17th and 18th October 2024 during the ReThinkable Festival, with the unveiling of a final large-scale billboard on Via Formica. This billboard will serve as the visual opener, with the installation being treated as a performance in itself.
The final act of the billboard installation, carried out by a team of public workers, becomes a crucial part of the exhibition. This “performance” is a deliberate nod to the invisible labour involved in installing advertising, serving as a metaphor for how we overlook waste in daily life.
By turning this mundane task into a spectacle, the exhibition asks viewers to reconsider the value and visibility of both waste and advertising. This act will be documented and will form a critical part of the exhibition’s narrative.
more info here
There is something fascinating about trash. It always catches your eye.
The power of a faded can of Pepsi left for years under the sun, next to a thriving bunch of mushrooms sitting peacefully in the woods next to my hometown, just few kilometres from the border. That's my first memory of human dumped trash. The faded blue and the Pepsi logo, Pepsi - not Coca Cola because Yugoslavia was a communist country and Coca Cola was too American to be even allowed in the country. I don't know if they sold it, but I have no memory of it - at least before 1990.
Then things changed. Coca Cola cans started showing up, even in the woods.
Sign of the times. Joining the West. Pepsi though, I used to like it better, especially the Yugoslavian one.
And of course there was, and there still is, Cockta: what I would describe as the Marmite of the Balkans, not because it's a spread but it elicits that same love/hate relationship. Nonetheless, this is not a series about Yugo Nostalgia or Eastern European fizzy drinks.
This is a series about litter and brands, and how much humanity is reflected in the trash it generates.
No more Pepsi in the woods nowadays. But plenty of Coca Cola, iPhone cables, Mondelez products, Heineken beers, not only in the woods next to my house, but worldwide. Branded trash is not just simple trash. It's not just an environmental disaster.
Branded trash is also advertising; unpaid for by the brand- insidious and everywhere; a point of focus for our busy brains and eyes; endless product placement in the movies of our lives. It doesn't matter where I am now, or what my tastes are. Pepsi will always have the power of nostalgia.
Climate Action & Visual Culture
University of Huddersfield
The capacity of visual culture to reveal the unseen and show in a new light (instead of, or as well as, telling and informing) is emphasised in Policardo’s Branded trash (In) voluntary product displacement. Photographs of discarded containers with sometimes faded and crumpled, but still clearly identifiable logos appear like still lives, carefully lit and staged like a product placement. Adding an air of glossy value to ‘worthless’ waste, these images raise awareness of – and in doing so are complicit within - the enduring, free advertising of litter. This project brings to light the circulation of value that not only spurs further ecological destruction but accumulates deeply uneven benefits and losses.
→ AC Davidson, University of Huddersfield