Soft Rubble

Building rubble – one of the world’s largest waste streams – is mainly downcycled for the construction of roads, the backfilling of exhausted quarries and other landscaping processes. As the seemingly valueless material is filled back into the ground, the natural landscape we quarry to create it turns into a man-made landscape that stays untouched. With ‘Soft Rubble’, Charly Blödel investigates mechanisms of value production and loss. In a performative build-up, textile containers made of Polyethylene sheet are filled manually with crushed rubble. This construction set can be filled and emptied repeatedly to create a variety of spatial configurations, becoming a tool to engage with our material surroundings and their impermanence.