TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Climate change art gets noticed
The Pulse of the Earth
Change Size
The Pulse of the Earth. SevenMeters.net
Silence is power. A series of artwork placed around Copenhagen has carpeted the city with a veil of silence, delivering powerful visual messages to draw attention, in a peaceful and elegant way, without a din.
The artworks — from thousands of 20-kilometer-long flashing red lights marking a 7-meter sea level rise to Freedom to Pollute, a 6-meter-high replica of the Statue of Liberty releasing smoke from its torch and symbolizing the US’ high level of greenhouse gas emissions — highlight climate change issues from different angles.
Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot and his Art in Defense of Humanism workshop are behind the sevenmeters.net art project.
Raising awareness about climate change issues is the main purpose of Galschiot’s initiative, which was originally launched in Denmark with a global focus, encouraging activists across the globe to take up his idea.
“By taking an artistic approach, I am able to visualize the problems in ways organizations and politicians are not usually able to,” he told The Jakarta Post.
“I expect people will see the sculptures, and it will hit them that we are actually messing with the Earth’s very balance with the pollution we are creating.”
With the blinking red lights placed all around Copenhagen, including near the Bella Center that currently hosts the climate change talks, he hopes to stir images in people’s minds of what the Danish capital will look like when the Greenland ice melts.
“It might take generations [for the ice to melt], but we are heading in that direction,” he said, referring to one of the long-term consequences of global warming.
The art project, a joint collaboration between different stakeholders like peoplesclimateaction.dk and illumenarts.dk also attempts to show that global warming is not merely about the extinction of wildlife and plants, or rising sea levels.
Through the works, the project also tries to showcase the huge impact of global warming on mankind, including in the form of future migrations caused by droughts and floods.
The UN foresees climate change impacts will produce some 200 million climate refugees before the year 2050 unless drastic action is taken.
“Wandering Refugees”, three 10-meter-tall installations consisting of copper faces peering out of long African women robes with shrill colors, and inspired by Sudanese female refugees walking through the desert, speaks louder than thousands of words spilled on refugee movements caused by climate change.
“Refugees in Water” placed at the Bella Center Metro Station, showcases a group of human-sized bronze sculptures placed in the water ditches under the metro.
“The Messenger”, a four-meter-high bronze sculpture placed nearby, depicts a messenger counting new climate refugees.
The project did not forget to include Copenhagen’s landmark symbol, the Little Mermaid statue, based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.
Near the Little Mermaid, the artist placed the “Survival of the Fattest” sculpture — a symbol of the rich world’s self-complacent “righteousness”.
The statue depicts a fat woman (representing the rich world), holding a pair of scales in her hands, sitting on the back of a starving African man (representing the Third World).
The installation does not shy away from criticizing rich developed countries for sitting like the mermaid on the rock or the fat lady — at a safe distance from water level, content and reassured — while island states around the world disappear, and hurricanes, droughts and hunger hit the rest of the world, especially Africa and Asia.
“We continue to sit on our rocks, convinced that over 200 million climate refugees the UN foresees in 40 years will not affect us.”
Glaschiot, who has been working on this project since early this year, said his work had attracted many responses.
“I haven’t really had any negative response even though I am depicting pretty harsh things through my sculptures.
“Many have said the works opened their eyes to environmental problems in another way than, for instance, climate organizations did, as they are more scientific and tend to ‘preach’.”
Galschiot and his art workshop have made all hell break loose in the past, the last time being 2008, when the project The Color Orange highlighted human rights violations in China on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Beijing.
For Galschiot, it is his obligation as an artist to depict how the world really is.
“I choose to focus on injustice and humanitarian problems. I think it is a disgrace that we in the West can live in luxury and have obesity problems while some 100 millions are starving and our companies are polluting and exploiting the world.”
