2023
“SAD TRASH” is a book of poems made for Instagram stories, composed of gifs from the Instagram stories library. “Sad trash” seeks to create a new language that is capable of capturing the complexities of our digital era. Marlene Font understands that Instagram story gifs have fallen into disuse, hence we can consider them as trash. In this process, the consideration of these gifs as objects saturated with meaning and reduced to an unproductive existence, lacking utility and defined purpose, is revealed. “Expelled from their place of origin, reclaimed by an artist, and exhibited for an uncertain purpose,” thus developing poetics of waste and obsolescence, while establishing poetics of ruins and surviving virtual debris. The trash that looms like a constant shadow transforms into an artistic object that reflects, through the creation of gif ecosystems, modern human problems and concerns created by social networks, creators and transmitters of beauty ideals, and forms of life related to success and capitalist consumerism, urging us to become heroes of achievement society, exposing our private lives as public goods, commodities and spectators all at once, in order to create artificial people.
Marlene Font
Argentina
Marlene Ayala (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1991) is a poet and designer at Perniciosa Editorial. In 2017, she participated in the first residency of FIPR. She is the author of the books “Family Game” (Perniciosa, 2016, Matrerita, 2020, and MalViaje, 2023), “Macumbita” (Matrerita, 2021), and “Esta historia no está disponible” (2023). As a digital poet, she has published the book for Instagram stories “Sad trash” (2023) and “Consumo Consumación” (2021), which are glitch poems that use QR codes.