In yesterday's post we mentioned a series of themes, including flip-flops, plastic, pollution and consumption. Let's continue the thread through further artworks part of the "Vita Vitale" exhibition in one of the Azerbaijan Pavilions at the 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice.
As highlighted yesterday, the country is displaying works in two different places, Ca' Garzoni in Calle del Traghetto o Garzoni, and Palazzo Lezze in Campo S. Stefano, and there are three projects on the second level of Ca' Garzoni that touch upon these issues in interesting ways.
Khalil Chishthee's life-size figures holding hands in a circle - a symbol of unity and solidarity - look for example like evanescent ghosts. Upon examining them more closely you realise that they are made with white plastic garbage bags, a way for the artist to comment upon plastic pollution threatening our ecosystem.
Most figures holding hands are incomplete and they prompt visitors to think about time passing and humans being erased by plastic damaging the planet. In this way the artist urges people to act together soon, otherwise we will dissolve, just like these ominous presences.
On the same floor, Chris Jordan's "Midway: Message from the Gyre" exposes the effects of plastic pollution through moving images.
Shot on Midway Atoll, remote islands more than 2000 miles from human habitation, the images in Jordan's film show plastic waste discovered inside dead baby albatrosses, illustrating the journey of our uncontrolled use and disposal of plastic products that, travelling from shops and houses, end up in rivers and oceans, killing the wildlife.
Bas Princen's large photographs are on display on the walls of the main corridor of level two. Princen's images show densely populated places covered here and there with piles of rubbish.
Mokattam Ridge (Ancient Quarry), a former sandstone quarry where some of the stones used to build the pyramids were mined, and Mokattam Ridge or Garbage City, reveal historical, geological, topographical and cultural transformations of the urban landscape in the most liminal places of Cairo - its eastern edge.
Around 30,000 Zabbaleen people (Coptic Christians descended from migrant farmers) setttled in this area. Here they recycle the mountains of rubbish piled around them (roughly half of all the rubbish in Cairo...).
There are no water and electricity in these areas nor a proper sewage system, but the community has streets, shops, a church and a waste management system through which scraps are fed to animals, damaged or broken items are repaired, while others are re-purposed or sold.
These works and installations mainly look at the consequences of collective consumptions, though Princen's images suggest us that new strategies can be created.
In the same way, the ground space of this pavilion - consisting in a room immersed in a dark environment and simulating a scientific laboratory - displays projects or theoretical ideas that may be employed in future to reduce plastic consumption and pollution.
Entitled the IDEA (International Dialogue for Environmental Action) Laboratory and curated by Newcastle University Professor of Experimental Architecture Rachel Armstrong, this space gathers ambitious long-term projects by scientists, artists and designers and draws inspiration from Venice' ecological concerns.
A set of aquarium tanks filled with water, light, and air bubbles introduces visitors to the main project of the laboratory, Zanzara Island.
A collaboration between Rachel Armstrong, Newcastle University Experimental Architecture and Marine Science, Davide De Lucrezia, Julian Melchiorri and Mike Perry, Zanzara Island is an hypothetical place, an island grown from plastic fragments and a culture of algae in a location 500 metres in the southeast direction of San Michele.
Can an island grow from a mixture of systems and forms including the millions of plastic bottles left around by the tourists visiting Venice every year?
Visitors won't be provided with an immediate answer to this question, but the set of installations in this room explores the interaction between plastics and algae in a clever way. If the two will turn into one heterogeneous body during the Biennale, a soil may be formed and this fragment of body may then end up forming the first nucleus of Zanzara.
The laboratory introduces visitors to Julian Melchiorri's Silk Leaf. As you may remember from previous posts, this synthetic biological leaf revolves around the concept of photosynthesis.
Melchiorri's leaf can absorb water and carbon dioxide and produce oxygen like a plant as the synthetic biological breathing leaves refresh polluted air and could therefore be ideal for applications in the design or architectural fields and even in space exploration.
While Mike Perry collects plastic and what he calls pebble plastiglomerates from beaches, building his own archives of findings (some of them on display in this laboratory as well), architect Azusa Murakami and artist Alexander Groves, founders of Studio Swine, use these artificial materials to produce furniture such as Sea Chair, a stool made with plastic found on the beach and remoulded through a custom-made device that employs the magnified rays of the sun.
Last but not least, "H.O.R.T.U.S. - The Venice Lagoon Experiment" by EcoLogicStudio reinterprets the briccola - the traditional Venetian oak posts that mark navigable channels through the lagoon - as bio-digital organisms that can regulate the traffic flow, offering a new equilibrium for the lagoon.
Zanzara Island is probably the most absurd of these projects, but also the most original, as it opens up new possibilities and could be considered as a project with a great environmental impact but also as an installation at the intersection between art and architecture.
It should be highlighted, though, that this fantasy island does not promise a happy future: while visitors may find it fascinating for its human, scientific and technological connotations, Zanzara may actually bring some solutions to the lagoon but further destruction as well. For the time being, though, it remains among the very few projects showcased at the 56th Venice Biennale linking art with science in an inventive and exciting way.
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