Clean Society

HeHe’s Clean Society is an exhibition about waste. It is a continuation of research and work around Man-Made Clouds and extends their obsession with recreating power plants in miniature. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Amsterdams ‘Afval Energie Bedrijf’, the worlds largest waste to energy company, who promotes its services with the slogan “for a clean society”. HeHe makes a link with a lesser known part of the city, as we prefer to keep our waste out of sight, by creating a model replica of the facade of the incinerator inside the exhibition space.

The second part of the exhibition consists of a documentary space about factories. HeHe has an ongoing collection of posters depicting factories and their smoke stack emissions which will be shown side by side withselected posters from the collection of the Laka Foundation (documentation & research centre on nuclear energy) In the back space of the pavillion HeHe’s monumental art work ‘Nuage Vert’, on the emissions of Paris biggest incinerator, is shown as a video projection.

The artists bring the infrastructure (the incinerator), the material (waste) and the communication around energy and waste inside of the exhibition space. Far from being simply a sign of pollution, the factory cloud has been manipulated to represent divergent ideas such as productivity, wealth, labour, energy, revolution, altered mental states and the power of the human imagination. In post-industrial culture, a sanitised version of the factory production metaphor has been appropriated by the cultural industry, where all references to ideas of pollution are absent. How does the idea of heavy industry and infrastructure relate to art to illuminate the delicate relationship between production and emissions?

Images copyright Laka Foundation and HeHe

infrastructure clouds