toolkit for the ecological imagination. Kai Lossgott & participants. 2016 – present.

  • Richmond, South Africa, 2016: an orange broken into peel, pith and flesh along a street kerb, children's hands reaching in. Caption and credit typeset into the image.
  • San Francisco, 2017: post-consumer fragments laid across the slabs of a sunlit Mission sidewalk. Caption and credit typeset into the image.
  • Antwerp, 2019: fragments of packaging among printed and invented labels on a white ground — a barcode, a Fairtrade mark, the word Polyester. Caption and credit typeset into the image.
  • Vinschgau, 2026: a loose constellation of post-consumer micro-fragments laid across grey concrete, the ground as stage. Caption and credit typeset into the image.
  • Vinschgau, 2026: the game laid out as a score on the ground — cards reading ROUND 2, ROUND 3, MOVER, softer, slower — beside the vocabulary box. Caption and credit typeset into the image.

The toolkit gives post-consumer waste a temporary voice. Strangers gather what the street has thrown away, compose a vocabulary from the words printed on its packaging, and sing it together, in the place where it was found.

A scrap of foil, a bottle cap, a torn label reading wasabi — things the system of design has already classified as useless become, for the length of a song, something that means something to someone. The toolkit was made to travel without its maker: a game anyone can play, at the back door of any museum, on any pavement.

three movements

  1. guided tour of your back yard — an audio-guided collection walk; participants gather post-consumer fragments from the street.
  2. stealing back our words — a cut-up poetry workshop that composes a language from product packaging.
  3. song for the missing — the sung public performance, in which the group gives voice to the objects.

iterations

Richmond, Northern Cape (ZA) · 2016 — founding performance. Open Lab residency, Modern Art Projects South Africa (MAP) with PIAD, University of the Free State. An orange cut up on a street corner became a spaceship flown by the voices of local children: small fragments high notes, large fragments low, and whoever pointed was the conductor.

San Francisco (US) · 2017 — Forum for Transnational Collaboration in the Visual Arts, convened by John Zarobell, University of San Francisco.

Antwerp (BE) · 2018–19 — Alternating Narratives, New Campus Sint Lucas, and The Shape Shifts, Gallery Gallery, Borgerhout. Fragments gained labels — part supermarket price tag, part museum caption.

Vinschgau / Val Venosta (IT) · 2026 — song for the missing, at the By Design and by Disaster conference (DDcon), Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, BASIS Vinschgau Venosta. The first time the cut-up words went into live public song.

writing

Toolkit for the Ecological Imagination: a practice-led, autoethnographic reflection on method. Kai Lossgott, 2026. In preparation.

related

hunter-gatherer · help yourself (where the cut-up method begins) · not in my back yard · can i eat it, can i sell it