Repurposing at Swoon's "Pearly's Beauty Shop"

Saturday night I attended a party/event in LIC called "Pearly's Beauty Salon" produced by the street artist Swoon.  A number of artists, including Swoon herself, were enlisted to provide various beauty services - some more traditionally qualified than others in their particular "beauty" area. The event also had basement with a DJ that attracted various grooving partygoers - many of them artists and eurotrash, although not at the same time.  Twice outside during the night, women dressed in semi-burlesque 18th C. French aristocratic get-up performed acrobatics on silk ropes, twirling softly and, at times, erotically, in mid-air between and through each other.  The party was a benefit for the space it was in, with proceeds to be used to help convert, or, as the narrative recited - to "repurpose" the space into an arts and performance center.

Along the theme of "repurposing", one of the artists, who was adhering bindi's to the foreheads of lovely attendees, was disseminating pamphlets on "repurposing."
The pamphlet, originally created for the Pittsburgh 2011 Biennial, was filled with elementary style educational information, and games.  A primary goal of the pamphlet was to explain why repurposing is so important, and the primary example used throughout was a brick.  A brick, as explained, encapsulated all the energy that was used to forge that brick - from human energy used to extract the raw materials and then prepare the brick, to the natural resources used and the various energy sources needed to facilitate the brick firing.  If the brick then encapsulated all that energy, then throwing the brick away after its initial use would be equivalent to wasting all of its encapsulated energy. That explanation provided a solid basis from which to think about objects as more than simply those objects, and was helpful in that respect. However, while understanding the sentiment that we should take care to continue the use of something, the statement ignored the reality that energy is always transformed and does not simply disappear - that many times extinguishing the existence of an object does not automatically render that objects energy to a garbage heap of forgotten use and uselessness.  Rather, its perfectly possible that the object and the energy served its purpose for that time and the better way forward would be to release the energy and resources into whatever new disparte elemental forms it needs to take, and start again from raw materials.  Also, the "repurpose only" philosophy seems to be a narrow view of the universe and how many forms in which matter can exist.     Certainly, if something can be "repurposed" to good use, people should try; we do have limited supplies of many resources, and particular objects are valuable.  But a philosophy that would also include rethinking new approaches to all resources and how to break down objects and create new combinations in different ways would embrace expansiveness.
       One of the games in the pamphlet used to educate was a game in which one was instructed to match the word on a left side column with a word on a right side column. An instruction advised that some words on the left might be compatible with more than one word on the right. What I found, however, was that almost any of the vague environmental and structural-cultural terms could be bound with any of the others, thereby really rendering the whole exercise practicality moot.  This game, amongst other pages, unfortunately undercut the  already limited usefulness of the pamphlet, and just added bulk.  Most likely the length was to justify whatever funding the artist received to create it.  Hopefully the pamphlets will be repurposed to good use.