As an installation artist, Ann Wizer (b. 1952) constantly looked around her surroundings for potential materials for her art (found objects).  In the early part of her career, she would collect pieces of dried foliage around her garden, toys from her daughter’s room and combine these with stuff from her kitchen such as chopsticks, honey and turmeric - anything that could capture and articulate her thoughts and feelings about the internal life, relationships and the passage of time.  

Born in Seattle, Washington, Wizer has always considered Asia to be her home.  She has lived in Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines for the past two decades of her artistic life and because of this, her art has reacted to the conditions and way of life in Asia seen from a perspective that combines curiosity, awe and finally concern.

Trained in crafts and sculpture, Wizer began producing art in the early 80’s when she and her expat husband were based in Japan.

Using pine needles, bamboo, cherry blossoms and chopsticks, Wizer created what seemed like three-dimensional pen and ink abstract doodles that hung on walls and ceilings in an attempt to capture abstract ideas such as time and energy, patterns of human thought and behavior (which she calls rituals) and the subconscious contents found in dreams.

The potential of garbage
Constantly seeking for newer materials to work with, Wizer soon found focus on the potential possibilities of various materials found in garbage dumps that dotted the cities she lived in, like Jakarta and Manila. Thus, her art showed a concern for the environment and began to involve the commitment of communities, NGOs and other concerned organizations. 

In 2002, Wizer launched XSProject in Jakarta – “an out-of-studio intervention involving poor communities and focusing on the development of simple solutions to problems of unmanaged consumer waste.” Because Wizer depended on the materials she found in her surroundings to produce art, her art no longer contained the echoes of her mind, but now contained the echoes of humanity and its dependence on consumerism and the mountains of garbage and pollutants this entailed. It also showed how her art can make a difference on a wider social level.

The XSProject involved “building awareness, environmental clean-up, and creating new sustainable livelihood programs for the poor by producing new products from consumer trash, offering ways and means for the poor to manage from their surroundings while generating sustainable income possibilities.” This meant hiring local scavengers to collect trash and wash, sort, and sew the salvaged items products like bags from which they themselves would benefit from the sale of the items.

The invisible = the forgotten

The exhibit Invisible is an offshoot of her XS Project in Jakarta where Wizer has worked closely with the “invisible” ones or “the forgotten, unseen and undocumented ones – the unemployed women who exist below the poverty line and bogged down with children/multiple dependents that they cannot leave.”

The materials she now works with are also called “invisible waste, trash that we don’t always see as it goes straight from factories into rivers or resellers/recycling sites. She is focused on making not just a statement, but a sustainable co-op, The Invisible Sisters Co-op, that will enable these women to use traditional skills such as sewing and crocheting to make a living within their homes.

For now, her line of trash products consists of bags, wallets and pencil cases made from the brightly colored soft plastic pouches that once contained beverages, fabric softener, detergent and soap. The project is adding backpacks, lunch boxes and laptop cases made from empty toothpaste tubes.

In a recent auction in Galleria Duemila, the bags fetched from $5 to $30 apiece from its bidders.  Wizer pays scavengers about $1.50 per kilogram of trash, about six times what they earn at the garbage dumps.

By Rachel Mayo / Photos by Stephanie and Jessica Rae P. Mayo