Basurama is an artistic and research collective founded in 2001 and based in Madrid, dedicated to cultural creation, production, and the critical analysis of production processes, waste generation, and the creative, social, and environmental possibilities they open up.
Their work operates between art, architecture, and urbanism, with a strong commitment to intervention in public space. Through installations, actions, and collaborative projects, Basurama reuses discarded materials to activate new perspectives on consumption, sustainability, and the relationship between community and the city, transforming waste into cultural and symbolic devices.
With Rebobinart and the Barcelona City Council, the collective Basurama developed the Cor and Teulades interventions in the district of Nou Barris, transforming waste and reused materials into installations that connect neighborhood memory, sustainability, and public space through collaborative and community-based processes.
Your work has been addressing issues such as consumption, waste, and the contradictions of the system for years. In a context where these discourses have become more visible, how do you prevent them from losing strength or becoming just another aesthetic?
Aesthetics wear out quickly; community processes do not. One of our installations may be visually striking, but its real value lies in the logistics of the materials and citizen activation. If a community appropriates waste in order to claim a right (to play, to public space, to energy sovereignty), waste ceases to be a visual fetish and becomes a political agent.
We try to avoid greenwashing by being pragmatic and, at times, annoying: if an intervention does not generate an uncomfortable question or solve a technical or social need in a specific context, we run the risk of becoming merely “the friendly face” of waste management. We stay alert by trying to remain critical within the contexts in which we work.
Many institutions today incorporate discourses on sustainability and recycling. Do you believe this reflects real change or a need for image management?
It is undeniable that there is a need for image management. Sustainability has become a new political and corporate currency. Many institutions adopt the discourse of recycling because it is the most superficial and agreeable layer of the ecological crisis: it allows us to feel that something is changing without questioning the production model.
However, we do not believe that this attitude is mainly the result of a purely cosmetic strategy. In reality, in almost every institution there are people who genuinely want to commit to a transition toward sustainability. The question is how far they are truly willing to go and how much they can shift the gears of their internal systems. In that sense, our projects are a way of testing how far they can go when discourse must be transformed into action.
One of the key aspects of our work is trying to give substance to concepts such as “sustainability” or “circular economy.” These are words that, through overuse, lose meaning and value in political and social discourse. If sustainability diverted the debate away from the economic model being imposed, recycling diverted it away from the dominant model of consumption; and today we once again run the risk of the circular economy diverting the debate away from what is truly urgent. As Marina Garcés says, we live in the “time of unsustainability,” a time in which the solutions to our problems have become obsolete. It is therefore time to reflect on how we are going to face this paradigm shift, what role public administrations should take, what role citizens want or are able to assume, what urban transitions are necessary, and what role education plays in this transition.
You often work with discarded materials, but also within institutional frameworks. What tensions emerge when bringing a critical discourse into spaces that are themselves part of the system you question?
This is one of the tensions that defines our existence as a collective. We do not avoid it, and although there is room to transform reality from outside the system, the truth is that we almost always work from within, which requires a constant balancing act.
The first tension we usually encounter is technical and bureaucratic. The system is designed for what is new, standardized, and predictable. When we try to operate with waste materials within an institution, we run into fire regulations, insurance policies, labor risk regulations, transfer agreements, and many other obstacles behind which there is mainly fear—not always easy to articulate—of possible public complaints, aesthetic rejection, and, we believe, a deeper stigmatization of materials simply because they are considered waste.
Forcing these materials into institutional spaces is, in itself, a political act that compels the institution to rethink its own rules of control.
To what extent do you feel your work can be absorbed or neutralized when it enters cultural or institutional circuits?
When waste becomes “beautiful” or “curious” inside a museum, it loses its charge of rejection. Cultural circuits tend to smooth out the rough edges; they want garbage, but without the smell, the real scale, or the inconvenience. Our resistance consists in maintaining the scale and the dirtiness: if what we bring is difficult to assemble, manage, and look at, it becomes much harder for the system to digest it and turn it into a harmless product. That is why, in our work, even when waste is ordered, manipulated, and reused, the material itself, its origin, and its memory remain visible. We do not hide waste; we place it in the foreground.
We know that at certain moments we become a trend. Institutions operate in waves: today it is sustainability, tomorrow it will be something else. In order not to be neutralized by fashion, our strategy is long-term infiltration. We are not interested only in punctual interventions, but in leaving loose threads inside institutions: reuse protocols that remain installed, contact networks that continue functioning, or communities of people with a critical perspective that can no longer be ignored.
In urban art and public projects, people often speak of “social impact.” From your experience, what is the difference between real impact and the narrative of impact?
For us, the difference between real impact and the narrative of impact lies in who tells the story and how long the echo of the intervention lasts once we are gone. Real impact takes longer to happen; it is measured long after the group photo taken during the project. It is also more difficult to measure, since the typical indicators applied to technical cooperation projects are insufficient. It is often more modest or less spectacular, and can be observed in details such as:
- Material autonomy: when a group of neighbors learns to weld or reuse wood and uses that knowledge to maintain or replicate the project they created with us.
- A shift in the perception of value: when waste stops being seen as garbage and starts being seen as an available resource. That mental shift is a structural impact.
- The survival of the network: if, after our intervention, the neighbors’ WhatsApp group remains active to organize something else, or if the group continues through the management of the project we carried out together, that is the true social impact. Social infrastructure is more important than the physical infrastructure we may have built.
All these qualitative values—which imply changes in perspective, management, self-awareness, autonomy, and capabilities—are often invisible in the final outcomes of projects. Yet they are long-term impacts that generate change on both a local and individual scale, while also having a multiplying effect because they are collectively shared values.
Do you believe that art in public space has transformative power, or does it often function more as a symbolic tool?
For us, art in public space should not have to choose between being a symbol or being a tool; it must be a symbol that works. Art has real transformative power when it breaks the imaginary of what is possible. When public art is useful, it stops being an object to be contemplated and becomes social infrastructure, or a vehicle for giving visibility to a long-standing neighborhood demand, or a means of provoking debate around a specific issue, among many other possibilities.
Regarding your work in Nou Barris (El cor de Nou Barris and the intervention in Teulades), how did you approach each project, and what differences did you find in terms of process, relationship with the environment, and type of impact?
Both projects emerged from the same context, the same open call, and the same territory, but they ultimately followed very different paths.
When we submitted the proposals, we felt that Teulades was a stronger and more forceful project than Cor, and we believed it responded very well to the “brief” we had been given. The original idea consisted of building a pavilion-sized structure, rather than the small “hut” it eventually became due to production costs. In an ideal situation, we would have brought that proposal to a meeting with the neighbors as an initial way of activating the square, while remaining completely open to modifying its form and material conditions in response to the needs of the community regarding that large soulless square, which is what the place essentially was. We would have identified people capable of building the tiled roofs we had initially imagined, and collaborated with scrap collectors to source the materials. None of that happened, for many reasons, and although the piece still functions as a tribute to the people who once made those grounds their home, fundamental ingredients were missing for it to be truly appropriated, lived, and used by the neighbors. On the positive side, the piece was realized despite a huge number of fears and regulatory constraints that all of us together managed to overcome. Many projects follow this same process: the proposal is radical, but once implementation begins, so many problems and conditions arise that either the project is never built or the idea is altered so much that it loses its meaning. In this case, simply managing to place that “house” in the middle of the square and proving to ourselves—the city council, the production team, the neighbors, and ourselves—that none of the terrible things we feared would happen actually happened, was already a success.
On the other hand, the Cor project emerged from one of those collective brainstorming sessions we have when approaching these kinds of projects. The brief was fairly clear, and it did not take long for us to focus on ideas related to sports and the heart. While discussing this, someone remembered that we had around 400 emergency warning triangles stored in our warehouse. It is a good example of how materials shape projects, because something as simple in design as a triangle made of three articulated pieces, with such a recognizable identity that everyone instantly knows what it is, conditioned the final outcome in the best possible way: simply by following the logic of the material itself, the project quickly took its final form. On paper, it was actually a relatively formalist project for the kind of work we usually do, since our projects do not normally represent a third thing as directly as this giant heart did. Along the way, we encountered some difficulties in carrying out our idea of placing it directly on the sports center façade, but that falls within the expected range of complications generated by a large-scale façade project. And unlike Teulades, the final project turned out better than the drawing. We think it integrates beautifully into the façade, even in dialogue with the flowers and climbing plants growing around it; hopefully, over time, that vegetation will partially take over our piece. And sometimes a symbol as simple as a heart beating for a couple of hours at sunset can be as powerful—or even more powerful—than the most complex and abstract artistic discourse.
In these interventions, where there is a clear community dimension, how do you manage the balance between real participation and narrative construction?
Although the initial concept of many of our projects often comes from us, the narrative is built through participation. Listening is fundamental in participatory processes; it is the only way to generate trust, transparency, and involvement among all the actors involved. We do not want to impose a narrative, but to build it collectively.
Working with waste in a specific context implies activating local dynamics. Which part of the process interests you most: the final result or what happens during production?
If the final result is the “what,” production is the “how,” and it is precisely there that we believe the capacity to transform reality resides. We are more interested in production for several fundamental reasons:
In order to work with waste in a specific place, we first need to search for it, classify it, and transport it. This process of urban safari, as we call it, leads us to explore and understand the territory in a different way. We interact with cleaning services, local scrapyards, companies discarding surplus materials, and many other actors. During this production phase, we learn what a neighborhood consumes, what it rejects, and what material flows run through it. For us, this material reading of the territory is a way of revealing an urban reality, and it often sparks the initial idea for the project.
Open design and negotiation. Our projects are conceived according to the context in which they will be carried out, and we try to keep the creative process open for as long as possible. Through this open-ended process—this back-and-forth with institutions, neighbors, and collaborators—the project becomes a continuous assembly. What happens during production is a constant negotiation between desire, technical conditions, and the materials and resources available.
The rise of festivals and projects has multiplied the presence of urban art. Do you see this as an opportunity or as an overproduction that dilutes content?
As with almost all projects, it depends on the objectives pursued and the ways of working. Large-scale events such as festivals or sports competitions are places of abundance—not only of waste, but also of opportunities to raise questions about leisure models and the management of social gatherings. Intervening by questioning those forms of management can help transform and improve them. The problem is that nowadays these places are merely spaces of consumption: everything becomes a shopping mall, and even social interaction is mediated by consumption.
Regarding public and private budgets, how do you evaluate the use of resources in these kinds of interventions? Where do you see the main contradictions?
At Basurama, we do not see the use of public or private funding as a stain on our record, but rather as a political position. If we only worked from the absolute margins, without touching the system’s money, our capacity for impact would be minimal. Our funding is highly diverse; we have collaborated and continue to collaborate with all kinds of funders. Contradictions must be managed because they are part of life. What matters to us is that these contradictions do not undermine either the work or the process. If there is freedom for that, then contradiction can become—and indeed becomes—part of the work itself.
Many brands and private companies have adopted the language of urban art. Do you think this opens up new possibilities, or is it simply an appropriation of codes without real return?
We live in a system called capitalism, whose logic is to appropriate any proposal it can exploit. It is not surprising that brands and companies appropriate codes and imaginaries for their own benefit. What matters is that this appropriation does not empty the language of its content. Pure aesthetics and image are temporary and disposable; art is not. There is a transformation beyond the moment itself: a questioning, an individual and collective critical process, a change in processes, perspectives, and ways of seeing, as John Berger used to say.
Where do you place the boundary today between collaborating with the system and being part of it?
We are all part of the system, aren’t we? What interests us is making the system transparent, visible, understandable… Once you understand how processes, management structures, and obstacles work, you begin to see the cracks, the side paths, the forks in the road—the places where things can change, where the system can be “hacked.”
We are not afraid of being inside the system; what frightens us is stopping the hacking. The boundary lies in negotiation. As long as we have the freedom to say “no” to a project that seeks only cosmetic purposes, or to propose actions that break institutional rules of the game, we will continue collaborating. The moment our solutions stop generating uncomfortable questions, we will have become part of the problem.
Artificial intelligence is entering the creative field, including image generation. How does this fit within a discourse focused on the material, the residual, and the physical?
At first glance, artificial intelligence seems like the opposite of what we do: it is ethereal, algorithmic, and apparently clean, while we work with materials that can be touched and manipulated.
However, at Basurama we see very interesting points of friction where the digital and the material collide: AI requires gigantic data centers and hardware that becomes obsolete at breakneck speed. Every generated image carries a traceability of energy consumption and materials (lithium, rare earths) that will sooner or later become physical waste. In a discourse centered on materiality, AI reminds us that the “virtual” does not exist. Every bit has an atom behind it, extracted from the earth and destined to end up in a landfill. We are interested in making visible this “digital waste” that we cannot see but that weighs tons.
If image production becomes increasingly immaterial, what place does working with waste and real matter occupy?
Working with waste and real matter occupies a central place in our practice, but perhaps now this work becomes even more central precisely because image production—and not only image production—is tending toward immateriality. In the face of this dematerialization, Basurama brings creation back into a physical and territorial dimension, working with discarded materials to make visible the material, social, and political traces that sustain any image or cultural project. Waste does not appear merely as an aesthetic resource, but as a living archive of consumption, inequality, and transformation. Ultimately, we seek to restore weight, context, and conflict through waste, discarded objects, and forgotten infrastructures.
Looking at the current state of the sector, what do you think is working, and what do you feel is being emptied of meaning?
At Basurama, we have spent more than 25 years watching concepts that were born on the margins become absorbed by the center, and that allows us to identify where there is still energy and where only the shell remains.
For example, “sustainability” has become a catch-all word that no longer means anything because it means everything; in urbanism and public art, citizen participation is often turning into an administrative procedure, just another checklist item to complete.
By contrast, projects where unlikely alliances emerge between informal waste collectors and data engineers, neighborhood associations, or environmental groups—such as the Autofabricantes project at Medialab-Prado, to mention one example—still feel alive. When art stops looking at itself in the mirror and becomes a glue that allows different sectors to collaborate, real things happen.
Other strategies and approaches that we believe are working include replacing the search for the final object with the creation of an “instruction manual,” where collective learning, open-source practices, and the transfer of tools take precedence. Also, the management of the “meanwhile”: in contrast to large urban plans or massive projects that never arrive—or worse, never end—tactical and ephemeral urbanism that activates spaces now is proving effective. Using what already exists (vacant lots, materials, social networks) to solve immediate needs. That ability to act in the present with what we already have at hand. Or the traceability of projects. In contrast to the opacity of the system, projects that are honest about their footprint are the ones that work. Projects that tell you: “this came from here, it cost this much, and when it ends it will go there.” Honesty about one’s own contradictions is today the most subversive value, and what truly keeps the discourse alive.
