The Overdue

SCIN-2007-001 Intermedia: Site & Time
Helio Eudoro Rodriguez Junior #2499853
Assignment #3 'My Interest & Practice'
Mar 24, 2020
THE OVERDUE
Performance and Video
For several weeks, I scanned all floors of all OCAD buildings looking for posters and announcements that has past due dates. It has been bothering me for a long time, unnecessary visual pollution and taking space from events that are about to happen. My proposal was to meet a demand from the Site & Time course and create a piece that combined these two elements. To the Site project I collected discarded objects at OCAD's premises and made a gallery of the unwanted ones, The Collector Room. Now I’m collecting these posters to satisfy two of my demons: the act of collecting and the obsession with order and cleanliness. At the same time, I was doing to OCAD a favor by cleaning the walls and old paper. Finally, the posters or any paper that has tape or staples are not recyclable so with my act I was saving a few pounds of trash from the landfill.
The process of collecting the posters that I expected to be pleasurable was actually stressful and annoying. I covered almost every floor and building at OCAD on a daily basis, having to read everything and find the dates of the event. Then it was removed from the wall, sometimes stick together with others and then still having to deal with the tapes. Very boring and laborious. I was exhausted. Over time I started to have a certain affection for posters that had an interesting visual appeal or an important message. I realized that even after the expiration date, some continue to be effective in increasing the exposure of important subjects. So, I started doing a kind of personal curatorship, I took only those that I considered not relevant and left behind those that I just liked or that were politically or socially relevant in addition to individual events, small galleries and zines.
My intention was to use all this collected material to make a papier-mâché installation. I wanted to produce a kind of Cornucopia, where space and time merge into an abundance of art, culture and events. However, with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cancellation of classes, I modified the project to a video that describes the performance and the process from the beginning to the unexpected end.
Finally, when I was at OCAD to collect my belongings before the university closed, I noticed in awe that, ironically, ALL the posters suddenly had an expired date, even those that had not occurred, since everything was canceled or suspended. An unexpected loop in time and space, much bigger than I could ever imagine. At the end, real life is definitely much more creative and unexpected than art.