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We’ve rarely seen Mexico City like this: a dinosaur leads a parade of people in uniform, the framework of a lighthouse stands in the centre of the city and residents of the high rise flats are making compost. A project called Residual is currently raising some ‘dustbins.’ By Franziska Kekulé

Imagine this: It’s a morning like every other in downtown Mexico City. You’re on your way to work and completely lost in thought; don’t notice that there are no cars on the roads today. You don’t even perceive that the usual noise of honking horns has been replaced by music and chanting. You don’t raise our eyes until, at an intersection, something blocks your path. It’s not a car, but a three-metre high dinosaur.

No, the monster is not the result of modern genetic engineering, but hundreds of volunteer helpers. They collected their plastic bottles for one year and gave them to the Mexican artist Eduardo Abaroa, who used the trove to create the impressive Cretaceous fossil. The idea for this “plastic fossil” seems very logical if we look at the latest scientific findings. They say that after humans die out as a species, in the same time between the extinction of the dinosaurs and today, only one thing will remain of Homo sapiens’s accomplishments: not films, not books and not music, but only plastic.

Four Mexicans, four Germans, four months

For someone like Eduardo Abaroa, this sobering knowledge is the stimulus to approach the environmental problem through his art. Residual offers him an opportunity to do so. The art project was an initiative of the Goethe-Institut Mexico that has been taking off-beat looks at the environment for a few years now, for example last year with the project Aqua – Wasser, which was realized in cooperation with the Museum of the Arts and Sciences MUCA Roma. Residual supports the work of four Mexican and four German artists who are working for a period of four months in the public space. Until September of this year they intend to show how the waste problem is approached in different cultural contexts and to heighten the environmental awareness of the people of Mexico City.

Photo gallery: Fossilized creatures in Mexico City

Peter Stegemann from the Goethe-Institut Mexico explains, “We are trying to reach the people at an emotional level, from person to person.” They hope that this approach will help to sensitize the residents of Mexico City to their environment since all attempts on the part of the city government in this respect to date have failed.

The containers set up for collecting recyclables remain empty. Instead, the mountain of waste produced by the city of eight million people grows by many tonnes daily. Bordo Poniente, Mexico City’s only landfill, has already had to be closed due to overfilling. Because of the concentrations of methane, the city officials simply found the fill the size of 600 football fields too dangerous. In the city of Chimalhuacan 30 kilometres away a far smaller landfill exploded in mid-June. Approximately one hundred houses were damaged by the explosion, which ripped open a chasm three metres deep.

Dealing with the garbage

“With Residual we want to show the population that waste is really a problem,” says project leader Stegemann, “but a problem that’s actually easy to solve: by sorting waste. Only six to ten percent of the waste produced in Mexico City is sorted.” One of the reasons for this is that over the past 50 years, since the landfills were created, waste has become a separate industry. According to estimates, about 200,000 people make their living from garbage in Mexico City.

These are the people that the art project is trying to reach through direct intervention. For instance, Thomas Stricker, one of the German artists, invites the residents of the Tlatelpocoo high-rise flats to make compost with his action Eternal Mortality. Heike Mutter and Ulrich Genth show the street vendors of Mexico City a way to operate a snack bar without producing plastic waste. On a deserted lot in Santa Maria, Claudia Fernandes is setting up a modern recycling centre. Paul Cardenas has launched the “Mexican Waste Institute.” Minerva Cuesvas and scientists release microorganisms intended to break down the plastic waste in landfills.

By contrast, the broader public is addressed by Eduardo Abaroa whose Carnival of Trash parades through the streets with sculptures and fashion made of waste, by Pia Lanzinger who puts street sweepers in the limelight on a stage and Tue Greenfort’s lighthouse with a methane flame burning to raise awareness for natural sources of energy.

Peter Stegemann hopes that Residual will be able to sensitize some people to the problems of waste. Then, if alien visitors should land on the blue planet in, say, 65 million years, they won’t find so much plastic.