A group of Syracuse University and SUNY-ESF students are hoping to address issues of waste and party culture at SU through a series of art installations consisting only of red Solo Cups.

“The Red Cup Project” aims to bring awareness and to encourage students and residents to think about party culture and understand the wastefulness of the frequently-used red cups on campus. The four-person group designed four installations to highlight this theme and displayed them throughout this week. Professor Lori Brown asked students in her ARC552: “Politics of Public Space” class to engage students using installations in spaces around campus.

Group member Vinh Vo, a fifth year architecture student, said the original idea for this project stemmed from the No. 1 Party School Ranking by the Princeton Review. They wanted to address the topic and talk about the party culture at SU. Vo said the iconic red Solo Cup came to mind as a way to physically represent the issue, and the group began to think of ideas to manipulate these cups in an artistic way.

“They’re so red, they’re so present and once you start to see them, you see them everywhere,” said group member Kate Chesebrough, a senior landscape architecture major.

The group collected over 2,000 red Solo Cups in the span of two weekends by picking them up off the street and through collection boxes. As they collected the cups, they took pictures of their various locations and posted them on an interactive map on the project’s official Twitter account, @redcupproject.

The first installation appeared Sunday on the corner of Ackerman and Euclid avenues. The group created a bridge that spanned the sidewalk with two large piles of cups on either side. All installation locations were strategically chosen. Group members said this spot was selected because most of the 2,000 cups were picked up and collected off the front lawns of houses along Euclid. Each installation stayed at its location for one day.

They wanted the cups to be organic and to flow in a natural way. They designed red Solo cup blankets that acted in this manner.

“What we had now were these big blankets of cups, and we wanted them to choke the sidewalk. You had to face it, you had to confront it, you had a moment of total immersion of red Solo Cups,” Chesebrough said.

The second installment Monday was placed on the corner of Euclid and Comstock avenues. This time the group crafted a “carpet” by crushing and placing the cups in a net. They chose this location as it bridges the public space of the residential neighborhood and the start of the private space of the university.

The third installation brought the cups to the Quad, as the group loaded them in cardboard boxes in order to show students what 2,000 red Solo Cups look in a very compact way.

Brown said that as a part of the critique, the students could not just throw the cups back into the waste cycle — they must find a way to recycle them. The closest recycling plant that deals with these plastics is the Tompkins Community Waste Center in Ithaca, where the cups will be headed for its final installation.

“We realized, ‘Hey, the real problem isn’t the party culture and it isn’t the chancellor, it is really the amount of waste we are producing,’” said group member and architecture graduate student Hamza Hasan. “Even if you throw all your red Solo Cups in the recycling bin, all right. They are just going to get thrown in the landfill here in Syracuse anyway.”

The group said they have received positive feedback from the community and hope the installations have a ripple effect throughout the nation. Vo said he hopes “The Red Cup Project” will inspire others to do similar projects, but with a “different spin.”

Published on October 16, 2014 at 12:01 am

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