project overview
Having traveled and lived abroad extensively, artist, Facundo Newbery, is familiar with the site of discarded refuse piled along city sidewalks. Relying on his aesthetic sensibilities, welding skills, and experience living in squatter communities, Newbery takes full advantage of such found materials by creating a newly designed and sustainable home, currently in Brooklyn, NY. Most furniture, fixtures, and interior design elements inside the Newbery home were found, re-imagined, and re-birthed by the artist. In this way, he and his family are the embodiment of the Homebuilding Project.
In Chapter 1 Newbery will be reviving a dilapitated school bus to run on bio-fuel in order to troll the streets of New York for reuseable objects and materials that will ultimately be utilized in his Workshop. After this phase of Chapter 1 is complete, Newbery hopes to send the re-booted school bus to the Dominican Republic to teach the community about organically-powered vehicles and ways in which people can take small, accessible steps towards a sustainable life and home. Lastly, the bus will be donated to a school system in the DR in order for it to reach its full DIY sustainable potential.
As Chapter 2, The Workshop, formed from an abandoned shipping container, will be a site for the artist to display his reconceived objects and to educate his Brooklyn community on methods of recycled transformation.
After working within his local community on DIY sustainability in daily life, the artist aims to create a self-sufficient home from disgarded shipping containers and other NYC waste in a remote part of the Dominican Republic for Chapter 3. This found structural approach to sustainability will collect rainwater for drinking, produce electricity from wind and solar energy, utilize biogas from animal waste, and support an agrarian system.
To learn more about the artist visit: http://facundonewbery.com
