Jesus "Bubu" Negrón
* 1975 Arecibo, Puerto Rico.
Cigarette Butt Street Rug. 2007
Carpet made out of cigarette butts. Presented at the popular market Souq Al-Arsa
About the work
As a commissioned project for the Sharjah Biennale, Negrón, along with street cleaners, collected used cigarette butts and turned them into a woven carpet. The resulting piece also included the documentation of the street cleaners at work and assistants fabricating it. The carpet is made out of the paper of discarded cigarettes, unrolled and layered on top of each other, while the design utilizes the yellow and white pieces from the paper to create a pattern similar to a woven textile rug. This work establishes a relationship to the local culture, while also relating to earlier recycled sculptures of oversized cigarette butts, the colillones. The decision to exhibit the rug in the Souq Al-Arsa, the popular local market of the city, instead of the biennale venue, followed the artist's intention to inscribe it in the context where it derived from.
After a preliminary trip to Sharjah and the rest of the United Arab Emirates, the artist decided to work on a piece that reflect not only the underlying theme of the biennale, related to ecology, but also the tensions around the class distinctions in the rapidly modernizing cities of the UAE, specially regarding guest workers, which are a somewhat taboo issue in the UAE. In this sense, he decided to employ the different guest workers (Muslims and non-Muslim) who work in the lower end of the labor pyramid in Sharjah in the recollection of cigarette-butts and later production of an “original” rug with this urban waste.
© From a text by Julieta González, published on the website of the artist.
© Photos: Haupt & Binder, Universes in Universe
Teil 3 der Fototour durch die Sharjah Biennale 8, 4. April - 4. Juni 2007. Direktorin der Biennale: Hoor Al Qasimi. Künstlerischer Leiter: Jack Persekian. Kuratoren: Mohammed Kazem, Eva Scharrer, Jonathan Watkins. 79 Beteiligte.