An eclectic artist with a broad cultural background, Gayle Chong Kwan's projects question the consequences of deeply rooted production and consumption paradigms of the post-industrial era. She frequently resorts to participatory activities inside a specific community that lead the public from the everyday to fantasy, such as confronting them with the practical consequences of its history,habits and beliefs. Starting from common objects or discarded items, she imagines the afterlife of these materials through a process of formal transformation and physical preservation, often resorting to techniques of the Victorian age originally used for collection, study and display. In doing so, she retrieves the artifices of the Wunderkammer to create marvellous reflections of the familiar by physical miniature, artificial illumination, optical enlargement and aesthetic resemblance.27 In public installations for subways and underpasses, such as Wastescape （2012）,Chong Kwan draws the passer-by into unfamiliar surroundings produced from the remains of collective consumption, like a cave of stalagmites and stalactites made of empty milk cans.28 The audience is invited to put its own beliefs and recollections into play, especially through acts of collective food consumption and narrative entanglement that allow participants to connect to their surroundings and behaviour. Her mobile Memory Tasting Unit (2004） or her microclimate sensory banquet At the Crossroads (2018） are two such examples. Discarded food becomes the privileged material of her communal actions, inviting the public to collect the remains of edible items on the streets and come to terms with their consumption habits. In Paris Remains (2008）, discarded food is turned into urban reconstructions and gothic landscapes, while, in Waste Matters (2021）, participants walk through Venice collecting food waste, which is chen photographed and transformed into fashionable hats taken again through the streets of the city.
　　Another perishable natural element is the core material of Sasha Vinci's art activism, as he uses flowers as an empathetic metaphor of beauty and transience in his collective processions. In most human cultures, blooms embody nature's energy and frailty while simultaneously constituting a powerful symbol of environmental and societal rebirth. Drawn from the Sicilian tradition of decking horses in flower garments for the patron saint festivities at the beginning of spring, the artist first adopts this deep-rooted technique to cover objects of individual or collective memory and then leads participatory parades that stir environmental and socio-political consciousness in local communities. For the project Mutabis (2016） in his hometown Scicli, he wore a mantelpiece of flowers and wandered like a shaman along natural landscapes and historical buildings soon to be doomed by human greed, either to be turned into landfills or exploited for commercial purpose.29 The visual and symbolic power of tlus action spilled over to other endangered territories, such as with collective processions that drew attention to the illegal landfills of Caserta in La terra dei Fiori (2017） or the overwhelming impact of tourism on Venice in La Repubblica delle Meraviglie (2018）.Participants joined in an open lab for the collective re-negotiation of the social,political, economic and environmental foundations of a truly sustainable future.