Library of Urban Treasures — NOMAD architects

“Linna-Aarete Raamatukogu”, Estonian for “Library of Urban Treasures” was our installation for the UIT-Urban Festival in Tartu. During the three days of the festival various parasitic installations from local and foreign artists were placed all over the city. Our intervention was located at the forecourt of an abandoned and rundown industrial building, right in front of the ruins of Tartu Cathedral. A very bussy small street, used by cars, bicycles and pedestrians alike, runs by the place, leading towards the University and inner city.

Our installation tried to replicate the look of a fancy art exhibition. A wooden platform and steps were embedded between old concrete walls in front of the ruin and wooden beams functioned as exhibition stands for the artefacts. Only on a closer look, visitors would realize that the colourful exhibition consists only of milk jars filled with building waste which we found across Tartu. Confused, many visitors started to search for the reason for this trash exhibition. On the end of each beam we placed labeled mirrors with quotes and statistics which deliver the message “Waste is a design flaw!”. Moreover, our cities and even our homes are large man made material deposits. But we fail dramatically in reusing or at least recycling these materials, resulting in a more and more increasing exploitation of natural resources and a self-inflicted waste catastrophe. In that way we believe our small exhibition could sensibilize many visitors on the waste problem and we do hope that some will seek actions to tackle it.

In order to not create waste ourselves by building this temporary installation we used all the wooden material as service, which means we only rented the wood from Puumarket AS for the time of the festival and handed it back to them after, in order to be sold as building material. This means we had to return the material undamaged and could not cut, nail or screw any of it. Therefore we used yellow rope to only tie the boards and beams in place. Part of the rope we reused already for marking out floor plans on clients grounds and the rest will be fantastic gift cord for many upcoming birthday and christmas gifts. All mirrors could be easily wiped and are as good as new and will surely find a place in our upcoming projects, as well.