Mutoid Waste Company

The Mutoid Waste Company was a performance arts group founded in the United Kingdom by Joe Rush and Robin Cooke in the early 1980s which continued until the 1990s, when it was based in Italy.

Influenced by the movie Mad Max and the popular Judge Dredd comics, they specialised in organising illegal parties in London throughout the 1980s, driven at first by eclectic assortments of fringe music such as psychedelic rock and dub reggae, but then embracing the burgeoning acid house music movement by the late 1980s. They were probably also influenced by the TV show Blake's 7, which featured Mutoids, reconditioned humans who had had their personalities removed.^{[citation needed]}

The group became famous for building giant welded sculptures from waste materials and for customising broken down cars, as well as making large scale murals in the disused buildings where they held their parties.

In 1989, after a number of police raids on their warehouse in King's Cross, they left the country and travelled to Germany where they became notorious for building giant sculptures out of old machinery and car parts, one of which was 'Kaferman', a giant human figure with a Volkswagen Beetle for its chest, offering a Bird Of Peace sculpture that overlooked the Berlin Wall towards the East Berliners & the DDR regime. They had a collection of scrap military vehicles including a Russian MiG 21 fighter aircraft which 'followed' them around wherever they went.

Lady Emma Herbert, daughter of the Earl of Pembroke, met the Mutoids at about this time. They taught her acrobatic skills and she toured Europe with them, which was the beginning of her career as a circus trapeze artist.^[1]

In the early 1990s the Mutoids moved to Santarcangelo di Romagna, where they set up a scrap village called Mutonia and continued working, displaying and performing at squats and libertarian celebrations in the Bologna region.

In recent years, the Mutoids have re-appeared at a number of British festivals and arts events, with displays of their distinctive vehicle sculptures.

References

1. ^ Jack Grimston and Julia Llewellyn Smith, Focus: Orf to the circus, The Sunday Times, December 14, 2003

External links

• Documentary about the Mutoid Waste Co.
• Webpage of the mutoid waste company

See also

• Survival Research Laboratories