 It is a great honor and privilege and real joy to be able to share Eleanor Street's work with you in this exhibition. I just want to spend a moment to introduce the panel, introduce Susan Voro. We respected Stoller in African art in addition to being a generous mentor and friend to me. She is a devotee of Ella's work. She has been following his career for many, many years. And as Matthew mentioned, she produced a film, Fold Crumpled Crush, which is a documentary of following Ella's work, particularly at the Seminole moment in 2007 in the Ganesh Biennale, and he made this international splash on the contemporary art scene. She's also produced a number of film segments that you can see within the exhibition as well, and a book, Eleanor Street, Art and Life, which we will be pleased to be signing after the program. Susan Voro, and finally that the man needs no introduction, this work is really an introduction to himself. I have the great pleasure of welcoming Eleanor Street to the museum, and I would ask that you all join me again and welcome Eleanor. So the format that we settled on for this afternoon's program is basically a conversation. We just want to have a dialogue amongst the three of us, and I think we'll start with Susan. In the galleries yesterday, aside from being thrilled to be with those wonderful pieces again, I was really interested to get into conversations with people who asked me questions basically about the relationship of the work to African art, African textiles and so on, and I found myself wondering if we knew that the artist who created those works was from Venice, we would see them related to Mosaic, we would see them related to San Marco, to the Byzantine tradition, and if we thought the artist was from Vienna, we would think they were related to Klimt, to the great moment of Viennese glory and so on, and to that heritage and that the artist was expressing that, and if we thought the artist was from Las Vegas, we would make a whole lot of others. If we thought the artist was a woman, we would say, oh yes, it's client, it's beautiful, it's flexible, it's very feminine, so I wonder to what extent is it legitimate, fair, appropriate to look at your work so strictly in the box of African art and African culture? Isn't there more? Well, maybe I'll start by thanking the Brooklyn Museum for giving it an opportunity to have my first museum show in New York all coming out of that question. To what extent do you encourage or invite people to look at your work in terms of Africa, African art, and African history as opposed to the context in which it is now displayed, which is world art, international contemporary art? That is the context in which you are showing. And I'm asking, obviously it's a balance, but where do you put the balance yourself? I don't think that that is a problem for me, and so I don't have to think about how to put a balance. What I know is that as an artist I am trying to reach out to people, no matter where they live or come from, and so whether it's African or Western, that just doesn't matter to me. I regard myself just simply as an artist, and not necessarily an African artist, or Ghanaian artist or any such thing. And I think if I should use statistics too, the larger number of people who have collected my work are not from Africa. So it means that whatever it is I'm doing, it reaches out, and therefore it's not necessarily limited to Africa. It could originate from Africa, but then it reaches out beyond Africa. That's always what has seemed appropriate to me. It's always been interesting to me to look at your work in the context of the artists you were exhibiting with at the time. And you can see how radical your work is from the 1670s, 80s. When you look at it alongside the artists you were exhibiting with in Nigeria, mostly Nigeria and elsewhere, but mostly they were African artists. And now you're exhibiting in another world, you're exhibiting in international Biennales, and it really seems interesting to look at the work in that context. And in Biennales, of course, the artists come from everywhere. So they're not coming from nowhere, they're coming with their own heritage and their own ideas and their own tradition. So it's just really interesting. I still see it as a kind of balance because of both. You're an artist, and you're making art, but you're also an African artist. You're an African man making art. And all of those things, men, African, all of those things somehow go into our mix of as we try to understand the world. But Kevin, I'm sure you're aggressive with this as well. No, sir. That is something that was a particular interest to me when I was thinking charged with presenting your work as the curator of African art here. It was important for me, thinking about your work in the context of an encyclopedic museum that connects both contemporary art and African art, that we offer some way of understanding the connection to both while also making it very clear that from the get-go you are, as you say, an international contemporary artist first and foremost. And then from that we can develop the themes of metaphors that are in play at work. But from that position, one of the things that interests me is you have this chance to travel the world, to travel the globe, particularly the last six or seven years, to see many, many different types of artists. And I'm sort of curious what artists you're interested in and following now, and if you find yourself in dialogue with anyone in particular. Yeah, I think that was that from how I was made. Thank you. Yeah, I went to, well, I started life completely sequestered from my own culture, living in a mission house with an uncle who brought me up. He was a reverend, and so my environment of school, which is a Western thing, and church, which is also from outside. And so I didn't have much of an opinion to mix with, you know, and so I didn't know much about my local culture. And I lived in that kind of situation throughout high school and went to university from there. And in university, that school was affiliated to a university in London. And therefore, curriculum, everything was transplanted from there to Ghana. And therefore, we didn't have much contact again with that curriculum. We had much content that referred to our local circumstances. So it was just a few of us who, towards the end of the art school, decided that there was something missing and that we needed to know something about our own visual culture or artistic culture as well. And from that point, we started searching. And luckily for us, there was this national cultural center right in the center of the university. And I remember I used to go there weekends to sit down and watch musicians, dancers, artists. You know, there were people casting in bronze and there were people carving as well. Over there, I saw a certain collection of science or what I call ideograms. They are ideograms because they are not alphabet per se, but they would stand for maybe a saying or an idea. And I was very interested in that because they, to me, were attempts to encapsulate very abstract ideas, intangible ideas like the omnipotence of God or versatility, the soul. You know, such things. Now, the reason this was very attractive to me was that just before it, we had just finished looking at European Renaissance art. And anybody who knows about Renaissance art would agree that it was something that was made for the eyes. You know, it wasn't something that you need, the mind very much to approach. But here, I was looking at very abstract concepts being given life. And it was very attractive to me. And I stayed with this science, studying them, trying to understand their structure and their meaning and everything. And that was the beginning of my career. So right at the beginning of my career, I've been grappling with abstract concepts. You know, maybe that's what has made my work a bit different from that of most you mentioned, that my work is different from some of my colleagues. Yeah, maybe that might be the reason why it's different from. Because many people who went to art school would stick to the Renaissance idea of versatility and such things. And also the materials, the medium. Yeah, and also the medium and everything. Whereas in my case, having been cut away from my own culture for a long time, I think it developed a very strong hunger in me. Hunger and thirst and everything for it. And I decided that if I should carry on my career with art career, then I have to indigenize my ethos. You know, and right at the art school, I started doing that. First of all by looking for media that are immediately available and around in my environment. And then processes and ideas that are sourced from there. Do you want to tell them about the trace? Tell them about the trace. Okay. Yeah, I think the first form of sculpture, well I don't know what you call it, yeah it's sculpture because it's three-dimensional. Yeah, it was that I went to the market and saw this trace, you know, wooden trace that I used by the women to display their wares. And decided that these things that I should start exploring, you know, having studied the science and ideograms from the National Cultural Center, I decided that I would use this trace as my support and intervene with these signs in them. You know, normally the signs are printed on a funeral cloth, cloth that is worn on funeral. And they normally put in big clusters, you know, on these cloths. But in my approach I wanted to isolate each and put it in a tray and then design a border which would help to enhance its meaning. You know, so and also used a very low-tech, available method of deploying these things in a trace, in this way of branding them with hot rod, you know, and then had a strategy of also displaying them in constant, you know, not one tray at a time but a group of them at a time, you know, so you could change their order or their formation or whatever at any time. So many questions. One of the, I think one of the really dominant things in your work, something you've said is really central, is process and medium. That the work is really about process and medium. And I wondered if you would like to talk a little bit about the medium of bottle tops, which is a highly unusual one. In fact, I don't think anybody else is using that medium except you. About how you discovered it and why you have stayed with it for so long. First of all, why did I stay with it for so long? Because it still has a lot of things that it is revealing to me. You know, actually when I did the first one or two pieces, I thought it would not be a very short run. Yes, what to do would fit, but as I kept... That was in 2002. Yeah, no, the first one was in 1999. But my first exhibit in 2002, I saw that the potential that material has and kept working with it. And with each work, I discovered a new way of, you know, manipulating it. And initially, I was thinking of just sculpture, a form that is free and fluid, elastic, you know, easy to manipulate and doesn't have a specific form, just like Statue of Liberty is always carrying it. But it should be able to do so many things, you know, at any time. That was what I started with. And the medium itself, bottle caps, drink was introduced into... Well, drink, that was not necessarily all drinks. Drink goes for Europeans to have, because we were making our own drinks. But Europeans came with bottled whiskey and brandy and rum and other things, and they had caps on them, you know, which were some of the items that they brought for trade with the continent, you know. So that the initial contact between Europe and Africa I think is... I had drinks there as one of the witnesses, of the participants, you know. And I think these drinks were changed for so many goods and eventually slaves and so many things that were brought to... The slaves in particular brought to America and they produced sugar cane and other things that they make rum and send it to Europe and then it comes back to Africa again and then it's changed for, you know, so that... I have a feeling that the drink, you know, was a very strong link between the three people on the three continents, you know. So in working with the bottle caps, I have a feeling that I'm working with something that has to do with history. Incidentally, my work has not consciously but, you know, somehow made reference to aspects of the history of Africa, you know, and this is just one of them. It's also often to consumption. A lot of... beginning with the wooden trays that he was talking about were used to display basically food, fruit, vegetables, things that were for sale in the market and that's been a kind of consistent thread, isn't it? Yeah, when we talk about consumption, then I look at this from so many other angles or in terms of other media that I've used, you know. There's a time I realized that unconsciously I've been working with media that have something to do with consumption. The trays have to do with food. I work with a series of ceramic pieces called the broken pots and the pots have something to do with water and food and later on I work with wood again and old wood that have been used by humans and the commonest type that I eat was the mortar and the mortar has something to do with food again and then finally the bulk caps, you know, which have milk chains and you know and so I have a feeling that there is a common line that runs through all the media that I've used so far have something to do with food or literature and I want to link it with development and my hunger, you know, for discovering my culture, you know in my search for satisfying my hunger for my culture I work with objects which have to do with food. You create these sculptures that are so densely packed with meaning that potentially they're abstract but they, as you say, they reference various sort of links to your own culture, the places you've experienced, to food but yet it's very important for you that this work adapt and change every time you install it. What point is that so central of a part of your practice? Yeah, I don't know but it's also something we've developed organically that I can't explain but I work with, you know, kind of school fair that you brought up on where you were given a life model and the model has to pose in a particular way and be able to maintain that for maybe a week or so. And I was thinking why should that be so? Why should an art work be that way? And I have a feeling that the art work is life itself and life is not something static, it's forever changing, forever in a state of flux. And if that's the case then the art work should be in a state of flux. So right from the trace which I will display in clusters that you can change the form of, you know, to the wood slabs that were numbered by the numbers were just initial propositions that I make. You can decide to ignore them and have a different sequence all the way down and make something different out of what I have suggested with the bottle caps, you know. I think it has something to do also with desire to kind of invite people to also be a part of what I'm giving. I think I keep a data and they have to be able to manipulate that data and get something else out, you know. And it's been a very interesting experience, you know. Especially when I watch my shoes travel to different venues and I see some curators are kind of scared and some are there. And I think these days after so many times of preaching about freedom and you know that I offer them to some of them are picking up and doing very great stuff. I just came from the University of Michigan with a retrospective right now and I saw that they were able to mount some of the works very interestingly and give them ships that I haven't seen myself or would have thought about myself. And over here too, when I passed through on my way to Michigan I peeped in and saw very interesting and daring experiments that they have made with the works that I sent. And maybe later on I'll ask you why you displayed certain of the works, ways that I haven't seen them before where the first one would be the one on the wall which was supposed to be at the river. At eye level but they put it very low. And when I saw it it was very exciting to me, you know. And then the second one would be the glee. Where most of the venues that have been to have seen it organized horizontally. But you play with the vertical and horizontal, there are even some type of house. And then I saw that you lifted most of the so-called walls off the ground. If you can't give some, raise it yourself. Oh, I can't do that. Now, we were very inspired by your admonition to curators to collectors to take your work and use it to respond to the space. And that's really particularly what happened with the glee. We had this incredible 72 foot rotunda that is very rarely used for art. Very rarely do we have art of a stale that will actually fill that space. And so we wanted to think about how best to make use of that space. And we thought about glee is designed as a sort of architectural environment in which you are, you find yourself as a visitor immersed and sort of surrounded by these works. And so we wanted to really make full use of the drama there in that space. I was also particularly inspired by a quote that I heard you give I think at Rice University when glee was first installed about walls and how when you look at a wall, your eye immediately, it's a barrier, but because there's a barrier, the imagination goes beyond it and looks up and looks beyond it. And so I sort of thought this idea of looking up into the space was an interesting way of relating to that idea of a wall. That was again thinking about the title. River seems something that would be low to the ground and the space was more interesting if there was a variance. Switch gears for a moment. Your work is constantly being compared to cloth and in particular to kente cloth. Your work is always being compared to cloth and to kente cloth. And I wanted to read something that you said a while ago but I think it's really kind of an interesting thing I'd like to hear how you feel about this. You said, I made a mistake when I started naming the Mount Hanging's after cloths because people seized upon that so that all they do is build a point out of kente cloth and then that ends everything. But the idea behind these works is that they are to be looked at as sculpture, pieces in which in which case you have to look at all the ramifications that go into a work of sculpture, the process, the material and so forth. When I was in the gallery a couple of days ago people were talking about kente and I wondered, particularly with the most recent pieces, not these necessarily, but the ones that are no longer square or rectangular, ones like Gravity and Grace and Amemo in particular that are in the gallery upstairs, I wondered how you felt, what you felt the relationship was to cloth? Yeah, as what produces cloth, you know, I've been in a process that I didn't quite get attracted to, you know, throughout my life. You know, in my family and in fact in my hometown everybody was with me. They attracted me, you know, and I went to art school and produced to all the areas. You said it did or it didn't attract you? It did or it didn't attract you? No. Did not? No. And in art school they were introduced to all the areas including textile and that was the area that I just detested. I didn't know, but you know, I mentioned that I took, you know, my career, a spring from a body of eight kilograms and science. These are printed on textiles. So it's not a textile that attracted me, this is the stuff, the content of textile in that instance, you know, the meaning of, you know, so myself as a sculptor and what I was doing initially was sculpture. But then the colors came in. The colors certainly weren't things that I had a decision about. Any number of body caps you collected in my environment just happened to have the color scheme or yeah, the color scheme of the color palette of the category, you know, yellow, those are the blacks and you know, they were there all the time, you know, and I didn't know how I could have wanted it because initially I was working as a sculptor and then I wasn't constantly the colors and I was just mixing everything up and so they were looking like and they, no matter what you do, they look like they are. Can they, they thought I detest can they, can they, is an iconic is an iconic art form you know, which I don't think as an artist you want to reproduce. It's already big. It doesn't need you to make it. So that was different, different things happen to align itself you know, because of the decision that a drink maker would make with the colors of their watercolors Actually, a comment I'm not even sure you have noticed this so much but African textiles are made in bands with Kente's made in bands and the bands are sewn together and the cloth, the proper direction of the cloth always has the bands running horizontally, always. They're printed, they're published sometimes sideways but the bands should run horizontally and it strikes me I don't even know to what extent do you think about this and how to what extent it's just automatic your bands run horizontally whether the thing, whether the piece you're using plain it's running horizontally pretty much if you've tried it it's for a reason and it seems to me that there's a kind of really deep sensibility about what feels right about that horizontal matrix that you get in so much of the piece Yeah, I think he has a sculptor again and my the only way that stuff can be structurally strong is when they run this way you know must not run this way Also they produce big billows you can make very big creases when they run that way because they have a kind of shape and the other aspect that I would want you to ask that the shapes of my Yes, now that you have left you pretty much recently departed from the rectangular form that's like a sheet, like a box Yeah, I want to re-emphasize my sculptural interest you know, so the form would have no top, no bottom no side, would have no right you know, just free and I would say develop the formats structures that make it possible for you to turn them in any direction and they would still be viable Even by the way from to back, I've seen and also I would make the two sides all viable so that occasionally change the other side have something that makes some meaning But you've also said that it's the fluidity and flexibility of the cloth that attracted you As you look at what the fluidity of the cloth has turned into, your cloth your pieces, your hangings have turned into in this exhibition Would you like to comment on that that sense of malleability Yeah, I think for instance these two pieces, look these two pieces, red cloth and black cloth Oh, okay Doctor, those are all the words I want to talk about Well, red cloth and black cloth they are about power blocks and well, I saw this and I think they did an effective job with the installing because you would see a lot of pent up force in other venues I think they were more beautiful objects but here they were kind of simbolicary strong objects and what I want to talk about is the hand raised in which I think they were trying to visually interpret the work with the mounting by making the gravity side is down the floor flat and then the grace side was really good which I think is another interesting way that I have watched that work get exhibited in different venues there have been venues that it was not on the horizontal but on the vertical where you had the grace of an ingravity or down below which is grace and which is gravity which color color the light color the white side and the red side is gravity thinking about that piece and the idea of an image comes up soon we can see it again gravity grace of your works in this show is the work that seems to show the direction that you're taking these bottom top works in the last few years where we're seeing a really interesting play of color and line beginning to emerge in the way that you're treating these as a composition can you talk a little bit about how we've reached that point in the work where you're developing these as almost painterly compositions I've collected for many years I have huge piles and so on I can afford the luxury of saying I want to do something and I want this color and I'll be able to have all set for it and get it it's like a painter you have all the colors and all the palettes there and then I have all the palettes there and so I can decide what to do with them I can decide to restrict a work to one particular color signature and do it without any problems now still with the same materials they're exactly the same materials that are producing these colors it's a matter of sorting them by brand basically that allows you can get pink if you pull out the white caps that have the red caps that have white printing on them for example and that's really an interesting thing that I think we've started to do whereas here the red areas probably include some caps that have some white on them but they're mixed in so you don't get that shading it's fascinating to me what you've begun to do with shading and with color yeah I think when I became conscious of the color in the work taking on the challenges that painters also take series of findings and then they look very transparent so a reminder of water color washes transparent water color washes that are useful only and you have the idea of transparency in the safe route and so I have developed several used wood easily and passed on what a painter would do with the facility of the brush but it's different from the canvas in today's times there's a wonderful long article in many of you are unsure of seeing at the end of the article you say that you want to go to a new kind of buoyancy and I've seen the work move from a kind of opaque solid bottle top to the more transparent form that you're describing that is in me that's kind of like a hope you work in that or veil what will buoyancy where will buoyancy take you I don't know well you know as artists you have the freedom to let your imagination travel anywhere I don't know where the buoyancy will take me I don't worry about it well it's interesting about three years ago when we interviewed you in tsuka no maybe even before that you said you were moving towards something ethereal and pure and that was before you went I think that transparent veil like space was ethereal and pure and so buoyancy you see where buoyancy goes so it's already starting it's already starting you had questions you know you have always written poetry and your titles are often not always there was a time that I was very poetic there was a time when he was considered a career in music he was a member of the band this goes back to secondary school early college and considered a career in music so where in your work today does poetry, language verbal size things and music where does music come in because I know you listen to all kinds of music all kinds of music yeah maybe I wouldn't know where music is in but I can talk about language and the way I kind of relate initially my signs were from language sources and also you know my language is my native language they have a bit of writing it's a handy tonal language but then they would write it without tone marking so that it leaves a lot of freedom or yeah it leaves a lot of freedom of interpretation you have to be able to contextualize it in order to get what it means the same word same way no tone marking means so many things you take glee for instance glee glee this route the spelling is the same and there's so many words and having worked with forms that are not fixed forms that are free meaning thought that most of the time I would want to title my works in my language so that first of all distance is from people who speak my language so you don't have to be misled by any meaning or even if you understand the language you don't know what precisely it means so you left to worry about this idea of having these very complex abstract concepts that animate your work is something that we see running throughout your career and your career occurred in tandem with serving as a professor at the University of Nigeria for 35 years as a professor of sculpture of the Department of Fine Arts I was wondering if you would just talk a little bit about how being a teacher influenced if it did work in any way well maybe it influenced my work in the sense that well it enabled me to pay my bills it would pressure on my studio practice you know my studio practice was free to develop on its own you know it gives you such a courage to want to say most of the works that we began to be collectors items when I first did them I wasn't sure whether they were artworks or not when I did it I worked with the trace I worked with them for quite some period before I showed them for the first time I worked with the wood slabs I stayed with them for some years before showing them but four years before I showed them for the first time you know and the bottle caps who were there in the studio for about three years before I had the courage to show them for me they were just experiments and all three of them when they were shown for the first time attracted so much attention they reached out to so many people easily. I should say it's unusual really how many African artists that I know have been forced to make work themselves which means something that's typically African and many African artists that you know actually work in two styles one style to pay the bills and the other style is their own but that takes a lot of time and effort to sort of juice away from the serious work I think that's really been terribly important really really really important plus L the intellectual environment and the inspiration of the African art world that had a really important somewhere in Asuka for at least 10 years, crucial 10 years I think that was really important the African art world that we don't think about existing it was hugely supportive and inspiring I think for you wasn't it? Yeah at the time I went to Asuka that was a few years after the war and the war had kind of made that place a very yeah concentrated with the men in almost all the fields that you could think about you know and faculty was very high about at that time you know and I remember that people had read about read about and seen them there in you know full cover so to say yeah and that was a great inspiration I wanted to do about 3 years 6 years maybe 2 times the 10 of 3 years there but as time went on I saw that there was a place to stay and grow so the atmosphere the faculty time students decision to stay there and also consequent growth Actually as perhaps as a final question one of the questions I'm asked all the time is why had you stayed in Asuka now that you are retired now that you can live in any place you want you want to live in Asuka and I think it's interesting to hear why you chose to stay there most families here that's where my studio is and that's where my studio is and so after staying there I'm close to maybe develop studios in other places and other places because each place that you go to offer new incentives new ideas new media when you talk about the studio in Asuka maybe just describe for a minute what it is today what the studio in Asuka is today what do you mean by studio yeah the studio well I think the most important aspect of this is that about 23 years people that have voluntarily working and in their life what they do so much that on occasions and traveling I say okay let's close down when I come out the same door we'll work well these are young jobs from around the studio who mostly have finished high school and in Nigeria it's difficult to you know take the entrance exam to the university because the spaces are very few the places are few in the universities compared to the number of people that graduate out of high school every year so they spend 3-4 years trying to take the exam while waiting this provides them with something to do keep trying their luck of later developed it into a tradition that just to encourage them to work harder in order to move on in life that they pass and go to the university and take care of their cheese for some time just give a few moments for questions from the audience could you please describe your literal process where do you get the bottle caps from how are your works of art made are they done by the young people you were just describing would you tell us about that actually I think the answer to those questions is available in the gallery and there's a film in the gallery that shows the process itself shows you mind the caps and how they're put together thank you so much for this wonderful program I was wondering about if you do any kind of research by visiting a place that you've done installations at the Palazzo Fortuni in Venice or at Halei, Tokyo and now that's in Broken Bridge and the High Line it seems like you have a sensitivity to the texture of those buildings and those places and she's asking if you do research before you do the site specific installations because she says your work has a lot of sensitivity to the textures of the environments she referred to Broken Bridge in particular yeah, yeah, certainly if you are invited to work for a particular environment or an environment it takes everything and research to work on the High Line was initially for a museum of fashion in Paris it was on a digital fashion and in thinking about fashion you know I thought about several things and that I should use and one of them was the mirror the mirror is a very common accessory to anything fashion and that was our mirror and also maybe thinking about this the idea of the links between Africa and Europe mirror was one of the items and I was thinking of something that also brings in the environment in which the work is very well this in Paris was able to bring in the Eiffel Tower you can see it in the work so the Eiffel Tower appropriated as part of the work and in High Line to the all the tower the Empathy disability is also appropriated into that so that is the reflection of New York as a place that has skyline as a signature we have time for maybe one or two more questions thank you in terms of the tower we are all getting old and I just wanted to get a sense from you as to the kind of artists that are coming out of your workshop and the kind of breakout moment that you may see in terms of artists in your crew because it's a factor it's an incredible phenomenon you've got there but what artists are coming for that next generation from your studio actually I'd like to make a small comment that the studio really doesn't function like a factory but it functions very much like an artist workshop the way Titian's workshop or Van Dyke's workshop worked and many other artists but the question was whether you see artists coming out of the crew that are working in the studio or maybe among your students I was just thinking about the studio yeah that very interesting discovery or other about the people working in my studio several of them have passed the company but in case the causes they go for engineering computer science medicine medicine law economics it's only of late that one or two of them have gone into final and one went into music yeah two that have gone into creative area it's great to have one more question I was lucky to see your show at Wellesley College and various pieces elsewhere about to see the show here and I appreciate very much the opportunity to hear you today it's almost for me as when you take the detritus the discarded bottle caps as if they're magically turned into something so beautiful and I wonder was there in the beginning any ideological thinking about making green works which are helpful to the environment by taking stuff out of land that would go into landfill and turning it into works that could hang in museums into works of art so is that a is that a opinion in your mind when you begin to use these materials or was it purely formal and maybe economic actually L buys the materials in what is actually a commodities market a very small commodities market it's recycled aluminum that's sold to people who process it and cast it and make it into useful things so it's not actually detritus in our sense it would never have gone into landfills but in it it's recycled into it's mostly bought by local manufacturers who make pots, spoons utensils out of it it's aluminum so it's scrap aluminum yeah