delululand are a performance duo working through a visual, absurdist language, building a maximalist trash-future with a tactile, deranged emotional gravity. Their practice is rooted in reuse as a way of making, found materials actively shaping the work.
I took the opportunity to ask them some questions about their practice and how they work with reuse and found materials when they visited the CAN Reuse Hub a few weeks ago.
This is actually our first time using the hub! We’ve been looking on the website and try to collect stuff many times before, but we don’t have a car so the new city centre hub is really helpful! especially as it’s so close to our studio! It’s sooo useful to have an access to such a variety of art making materials and odd bits and bobs. We work sustainably and up until very recently most of our projects are super low budget (like literally made with pennies) but even when we do have a bigger budget to play with we still work with recycled materials and trash, so the CAN and it’s affordable nature is a treasure.
Tell me a bit about your work and why reuse or recycled materials are part of it?
To be honest we’re maxilimilsts and when we work together we’re constantly feeding into one another’s neurodiverse brains with highly visual concepts. The problem is that when you’re first starting out you aren’t being offered much in terms of budget. We’re both working class and really feel like sometimes the art world is super hierarchal about who can do what and where (from financial constrains to how you should behave when you go to see a show/exhibition…). We really want to oppose this and show audiences that you can make art with very little and by embracing what’s around you & what does every major city have? An abundance of trash…
Our making process always stems from the visual. Usually an image comes to one of our heads and then from there we might sketch it out or find something that connects it to a story, or a theme or a feeling we might have. We work a lot with subconscious imagery too. Usually the stuff that might keep us up at night or things that our phones might have burned into our brains. We love brain rot as inspo, and were drown to things and characters that are over the top, or been cancelled by society. In terms of our favourite materials atm we’re working a lot with plastic trash we pick from the streets which is quite fun, the cleaning process is quite therapeutic. We also noticed lots of flattened cans in the street so that’s gonna be next. We’ve had a lot of fun melting and layering bin bags on top of one another before, that was really beautiful. We worked a lot with paper mache masks, it’s crazy how much paper waste you can gather from local libraries and unis. Right now we’re really enjoying learning to craft much larger and softer costumes with foam, we got some at CAN (yay!) but got really lucky finding it in the street in the past (old mattresses).
Do you have a message for anyone that hasn’t started using CAN yet?
CAN has loads of really interesting and useful stuff up for grabs. It’s also a great method of finding inspiration and materials you hadn’t considered working with yet. Maybe you’re lacking inspiration and just need to run your hands through some yarn.
With the recent closures of so many creative spaces in Glasgow it feels great to know that there’s a network that still pushes us to create regardless of money. In this mass materials/ideas/ type of world we think the best thing we can do is to look what’s already existed out there flip the hell out of it and make something better (from materials to ideas).