X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Mutoid Waste Company


Mutoid Waste Company

The Mutoid Waste Company was a performance arts group founded in the West London United Kingdom by Joe Rush and Robin Cooke in collaboration with Alan P Scott and Joshua Bowler.

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.

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 Emilia Romagna region.

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.



see also