Natural Materials

ECOISMI 2013

12 - Dada d'Adda - Susanna BattinSunday, June 2 inaugurated Ecoismi, 2013, an international event for contemporary art in the heart of the Natural Park of the Island Borromeo in Cassano d’Adda, Province of Milan.

Ecoismi is a public art project that reflects on the processes and transformations that relate to the territory, the environment and present condition to trigger a reflection on the dynamics of ecological and sustainable.

Through the language of contemporary art, artists, architects and designers were invited to confront the issue of balance between man and nature. During the period of residence – work in progress they have created a multisensory path consisting of twelve site-specific installations realized n the area of the Natural Park.

The event, this year at its second edition, is curated by Ylbert Durishti and young artists, selected through a call, come from all over the world. They are: TheFleetGroup (Tbilisi, Georgia), AtelierFraSe (London, England), Päivi Raivio (Helsinki, Finland), Grace Zanotto (Milan, Italy), Matteo Rota (Casirate d’Adda, Italy), Julia Jamrozik (Basel, Switzerland) , Ada Kobusiewicz (Petrovaradin, Serbia), Chiara Sgaramella (Valencia, Spain), Diana Franceschin (Milan, Italy), Giacomo Zaganelli (Berlin, Germany), Selene Volpi (Senatobia, Italy), Susanna Battin (Los Angeles, USA).

Each of them has developed the themes of the project according to its own specific declination, in a variety of shades ranging from the question of energy savings that of climate change,from the action of man on the environment to the disappearance of some species.

All artworks are made with natural materials, recycled or recovered. The artists have based their poetry on the reuse of waste materials were reinserted in a cycle that brings them back to life, where nature and art have the opportunity to renew their reciprocal myth.

ARTWORKS

Radici (Roots) by AtelierFraSe (Francesco Gorni and Serena Montesissa) is an architectural intervention to “experience” the trees as living organisms, through the creation of wood niches in which visitors take their seats. Again in wood is made by The fleet Group (Vasili Macharadze and Bessa Kartlelishvili), the sculptural work Mesh, in which the two authors report an object, the foot into the wild after being initially converted into trigonometric language.

Blackout project by Ada Kobusiewicz introduces us to the theme of ongoing climate change on our planet and invites to reflect on the question of energy savings. Also Arca (Ark) by Chiara Sgaramella is focused on raising public awareness, her work aims to celebrate biodiversity by building an ark.

The intention of Grace Zanotto with Lux Flower, a photo-luminescent flower that opens to the sun, is to create an installation that speaks of art as a possibility for dialogue between the species that live on Earth, to renegotiate the rights of all living beings.

The geometry is deeply connected to both Ramificioconnessioni by Matteo Rota – which reconstructs the vascular branching of the leaves and branches of trees tie in the three spatial dimensions through the figure of the cube – and the project Kreuzungen by Giacomo Zaganelli who wants to pay homage to the relationship between man-nature representing the contemporary environment through a large installation by floral appearance, made with linen thread.

The work Un mondo sommerso (A submerged world) by Diana Franceschin want to flip up and down and the elements earth, air and water, immersing the viewer in a hypothetical dip in the middle of a group of fish. While Skyfield, by Julia Jamrozik, is based on the idea of capturing the ephemeral and changing nature of heaven, and bring it to the ground, providing a new context for its remark.

Päivi Raivio is the author of Unwind, an installation that uses the element of the wind, is composed of aeolian harps, forming a corridor 20 meters long. The project of Selene Volpi concerns sound research of natural elements, Scatole sonore (Boxes Sheet) is an artwork composed by a collection of sculptures that play with the action of the wind.

The project Dada d’Adda di Susanna Battin, is found in many parts of the park and is in direct connection with either observation of the territory of the island and with eleven works realized by other artists.

The objective of Ecoismi is indeed to activate a process of raising awareness of environmental issues by introducing principles of “urban ecology”. It also aims to bring contemporary art to diverse audiences by implementing a model of creative enhancement of externalities of the territory.

The exhibition is open every day until 22 September. Admission is free.

More Info: www.ecoismi.org or www.comune.cassanodadda.mi.it

eBook: Promoting natural materials

This post comes to you from Cultura21

This free eBook, edited by Päivi Simi and Outi Toumela, is the main publication of the long term project of the same title, taking place in Southern Finland and Estonia from 2009 to 2012.

The focus of the project lies in raising awareness and spreading knowledge on the use of healthier materials as well as on the environmental importance of using local materials.

From the back-cover:

What are natural materials? Basically, every material is originally natural. Even humans are composed of pure natural materials. We need better definitions like ecological materials, local materials, renewable resources, organic materials, and so on. We also need recyclability as well as a free flow of information. Everything we do or consume locally also affects globally. We must not forget that we have options.

Click here for the full eBook

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Call for Proposals 2012 Cheng Long International Environmental Art Project in Taiwan, “What’s for Dinner?”

Artists from all countries are invited to send a proposal for a site-specific outdoor sculpture installation to be created during a 26-day artist in residency (April 11 – May 7, 2012) in Cheng Long, a small rural village near the southwestern coast of Taiwan in Kouhu Township,Yunlin County. This art project is an expansion of the 2010 and 2011 Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Projects, going into the Village as well as the Wetlands. The selected artists will work with elementary school children and community residents to create large-scale sculpture installations focused on the theme of “What’s for Dinner?”  The artworks should reflect on environmental issues surrounding food production and emphasize organic aquaculture.  Artworks will be in village public spaces, on abandoned buildings, and in the wetlands nature preserve, and artists will use recycled materials and natural materials to create their artworks that will stay on exhibition through 2013.

Proposals Due:  Feb. 8, 2012

Artists Notified by:  Feb. 22, 2012

Residency in Taiwan:  April 8 – May 7, 2012

Selected Artists Receive:  NT50,000 (US$1,662), round trip economy airfare, accommodations and meals for 26 days in Taiwan, local transportation, volunteer help to find materials and make the artworks

Send the following by email to Curator, Jane Ingram Allen, allenrebeccajanei@gmail.com

  1. Description of your proposed sculpture installation giving estimated size and materials to be used (limit 1 page as a .doc or .pdf file).
  2. Sketch of your proposed work as a .jpg or .pdf file (less than 1 MG in size)
  3. Images and image list (title, date made, dimensions, materials/media, and where located) of 6 previous outdoor sculpture installations (6 .jpg files each less than 1MG in size)
  4. CV or resume showing exhibitions, awards, residencies, education and experience as an artist (.doc or .pdf file)
  5. Contact information:  Name, Present Address, Nationality, Email address and Website (.doc or .pdf file)

For more information visit the Blog at http://artproject4wetland.wordpress.com or contact Jane Ingram Allen, allenrebeccajanei@gmail.com

PUBLIC ART and LEED – Materials & Resources and Indoor Environmental Quality

This post comes to you from Green Public Art

continued from… PUBLIC ART and LEED – Energy & Atmosphere

MATERIALS & RESOURCES

Recycled Content – should be self explanatory. Use post-industrial or post-consumer recycled materials

Regional Materials –means all materials used in a project are sources within 500 miles of project site

rendering of Erwin Timmers recycled glass artwork

Construction Waste Management – To earn a credit in Construction Waste Management the project must Divert construction waste from landfills towards recycling or reuse.

rendering of Didier Hess' Orit Haj

Example: The artist, Erwin Timmers, dug through the site demolition to remove glass for this 30 feet long by 9 feet high artwork. The recycled glass was then melted down and recast into the new colorful forms.

Example: Didier Hess’ Orit Haj will incorporate rammed earth from excavation of interpretive center, stainless steel rod, concrete and concrete fiberboard scraps from building construction.

Rapidly Renewable Materials – are natural materials that regenerate in less than 10 years, like bamboo, straw, cork, natural linoleum products (such as Marmoleum), wool, wheatboard, and strawboard.

Certified Wood – And you can use wood if it is a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified wood product.

INDOOR ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY

Low-Emitting materials – If artwork will be indoors the material must have Low or no VOC (volatile organic compound) content.

And projects should enhance the Daylight & Views

The conversation continues here: PUBLIC ART and LEED – Innovation & Design

 

Rebecca Ansert, founder of Green Public Art, is an art consultant who specializes in artist solicitation, artist selection, and public art project management for both private and public agencies. She is a graduate of the master’s degree program in Public Art Studies at the University of Southern California and has a unique interest in how art can demonstrate green processes or utilize green design theories and techniques in LEED certified buildings.

Green Public Art is a Los Angeles-based consultancy that was founded in 2009 in an effort to advance the conversation of public art’s role in green building. The consultancy specializes in public art project development and management, artist solicitation and selection, creative community involvement and knowledge of LEED building requirements. Green Public Art also works with emerging and mid-career studio artists to demystify the public art process. The consultancy acts as a resource for artists to receive one-on-one consultation before, during, and after applying for a public art project.
Go to Green Public Art

Vancouver Park Board – The Ivy Project

The Ivy Project, led by Sharon Kallis, was a community-involved public programming initiative born out of the Stanley Park Environmental Art Project.

Vancouver artist Sharon Kallis works with unwanted natural materials. Through engaging local community in common handwork, unwanted materials are re-purposed into something new, creating opportunities for individuals to connect with nature in a unique, meditative, yet community oriented way.

Run in partnership with the Vancouver Park Board and the Stanley Park Ecology Society, the Ivy Busters program has removed more than 3.95 hectares of invasive species from Stanley Park since 2004. The intent of The Ivy Project was to create art installations that use the biomass that is unwanted and create opportunities for learning about the ecosystem of the park; is a creative method for observation and turns a material with negative impact to potentially good uses.

The Ivy Project saw over 180 volunteer community members turn mounds of English ivy into crocheted small bird net forms, woven nurse logs, a knitted boat, and a knitted anti-erosion blanket.

Please visit The Ivy Project website for more information and photos on this unique project.

Read an interview with Sharon Kallis by John K. Grande where Sharon goes into more detail around the process of re-purposing the ivy and working with SPES and community members on The Ivy Project.

via Vancouver Park Board – Arts.

Art as warning: David Olsen’s Vulture

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of art around these days questioning our relationship with the natural world and the creatures that live in it. Arts Catalyst’s extraordinaryInterspecies series last year contained a series of works in which artists “collaborated” with animals in disturbing ways that disrupted our conventional ideas of the co-dependency of the natural and human worlds.

As part of their excellent Flash Point series “How do arts respond to the natural world?”, art:21 blog has just published an essay by curator Nova Benway on the artist David Olsen, whose work explores the toxic impact we have on the natural world. As part of it he adopts the persona of “Vulture”, dressing in bizarre protective handmade clothing to ape the vulture’s adaptive strategy of becoming resistent to the pathogens that it finds in the decaying food that it finds. His attempts to become animal appear ridiculous.

Benway explains how Olsen then suberges pieces of work beneath the polluted waters of Benway Creek in Brooklyn:

The creek is one of the most pollutedwaterways in the country, and the sculptures are, in a certain sense, tools for healing. Made from natural materials like clay, wax, and rope, they employ humble filtration devices to purify tiny amounts of water, or crystals intended to absorb negative forces. One recent work, Witness (2008), is a seal skull with crystals embedded in the eye sockets. A rope attaches the skull to a glass buoy, so when it is lowered into the water it can float through the depths, “seeing” and collecting information or negative energy, until it is retrieved by the artist. Olsen adopts the identity of “Vulture” for these actions, wearing a handmade protective helmet and suit to mimic the bird’s heightened immune system. Of course, these activities have negligible impact on the rampant pollution of the waterway. Olsen’s deliberate mixing of pragmatic and mystical solutions to the problem further obfuscate their effectiveness, while retaining the urgent desire for change.

Its an interesting idea, and I like the idea of art-as-warning, but I confess the Mad Max apocalypticism of this work puts me off. That it revels  in the aesthetic of decay seems to dent the point it may be trying to make about the awfulness of pollution.

Read art:21 blog’s How does art respond to the natural world series of Flash Point essays.

Pictured: Above, David Olsen as “Vulture”; below, Witness (2008) by David Olsen.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Richard Long’s childish acts

What I’m reading right now….

This is from a great essay on Richard Long by Richard MacFarlane in the Summer 2009 issue of Tate, Etc.:

To my mind, his work is best understood as a set of persistently childish acts: the outcomes of a brilliantly unadulterated being-in-the-world. The word kindergarten was coined in 1840 by the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). Kindergarten, literally “a children’s garden”: a school or space for early learning. Froebel (less remembered now than Maria Montessori or Rudolf Steiner, for he didn’t lend his name to his method) wanted to create an environment in which children could be childish in the best sense of that word. Banished from his kindergartens was the Gradgrindian sense of the infant as a vessel to be filled with facts. Instead, he fostered an ideal of the child as micronaut – an explorer of the world’s textures, laws and frontiers, who should be left to make his or her own discoveries through unstructured play. Froebel wanted children to “reach out and take the world by the hand, and palpate its natural materials and laws”, as Marina Warner observes in a fine essay on play, “to discover gravity and grace, pliancy and rigidity, to sense harmonies and experience limits”. 

Read the entire piece at tate.org.

Go to Eco Art Blog

Robert MacFarlane on Richard Long


A Night of Rain Sleeping Place An 8 Day Mountain Walk in Sobaeksan Korea Spring 1993 by Richard Long, 1993 Courtesy Kunstverein Hannover © the artis

There’s a good article by Robert MacFarlane on Richard Long on Tate Etc, the Tate’s magazine, that attempts to see beyond the usual assumptions people make about Long’s work as “romantic” :

“I feel I carry my childhood with me in lots of aspects of my work,” [Long]remarked. “Why stop skimming stones when you grow up?”

Why indeed? It’s a lovely question – innocently seen and innocently phrased. And Long has never stopped skimming stones, artistically speaking. His hundreds of circles – made around the world in stone, sand, wood, grass and footprints – can be imagined as the ripples of these skimmed stones. To my mind, his work is best understood as a set of persistently childish acts: the outcomes of a brilliantly unadulterated being-in-the-world. The word kindergarten was coined in 1840 by the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852). Kindergarten, literally “a children’s garden”: a school or space for early learning. Froebel (less remembered now than Maria Montessori or Rudolf Steiner, for he didn’t lend his name to his method) wanted to create an environment in which children could be childish in the best sense of that word. Banished from his kindergartens was the Gradgrindian sense of the infant as a vessel to be filled with facts. Instead, he fostered an ideal of the child as micronaut – an explorer of the world’s textures, laws and frontiers, who should be left to make his or her own discoveries through unstructured play. Froebel wanted children to “reach out and take the world by the hand, and palpate its natural materials and laws”, as Marina Warner observes in a fine essay on play, “to discover gravity and grace, pliancy and rigidity, to sense harmonies and experience limits”.

A nature-lover and walker from an early age, Froebel had a passion for the patterns of phenomena, and in particular for what he called “the deeper lying unity of natural objects”. It was for this reason that the early Froebelian kindergartens had few figurative toys. Instead of trains, dolls and knights, there were wooden cubes and spheres, coloured squares and circles, pebbles, shells and pick-up-sticks. Children spent their days singing songs and playing games, arranging the pebbles in spirals and circles, balancing blocks and picking up sticks. This open play was, as Froebel imagined it, the means by which “the child became aware of itself, and its place within the universe”.

Long is a childish artist in the Froebelian sense, and the wild world is his kindergarten. When Clarrie Wallis, curator of the new Tate exhibition, observes that his work is about his “own physical engagement, exploring the order of the universe and nature’s elemental forces… about measuring the world against ourselves”, she could be describing the Froebelian method. For more than 40 years Long has been using his moving body to explore limits, sense harmonies and apprehend balance and scale. His materials and his vocabulary have always been uncomplicated and childish. “I am content with the vocabulary of universal and common means,” he wrote quietly in 1982, “walking, placing, stones, sticks, water, circles, lines, days, nights, roads.” Again in 1985: “My pleasure is in walking, lifting, placing, carrying, throwing, marking.” In 1968 he showed a sculpture of sticks cut from trees along the Avon and laid end to end in lines on the gallery floor. Five, six, pick up sticks. Seven, eight, lay them straight.

It is the play of “the solemn child”, as MacFarlane says. Read the whole article on Tate Etc’s website.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology