Friday 8 December 2017

GLOBAL ‘ART’ WARMING

http://goumbook.com/global-art-warming/

GLOBAL ‘ART’ WARMING

GOUMBOOK.COM / FEBRUARY 16, 2012


Global Warming. Berlin, art installation: Melting Men by Nele Azevedo.
1,000 mini ice sculptures in Berlin, highlighting the impact of climate change: a very clever and powerful way in which to get the message across. Melting Men is a series of art installations from the Minimum Monument project created by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo.
Since 2005, Azevedo has been setting up her Melting Men in various countries around the world. Although originally intended as a critic of the role of monuments in cities, environmentalists around the world are adopting her work as climate change art.
The project started with solitary figures, later a multitude of small sculptures of ice were placed in public spaces of several cities. The memory is inscribed in the photographic image and shared by everyone. It is not reserved to great heroes nor to great monuments. It loses its static condition to gain fluidity in the urban displacement and in the change of state of the water. It concentrates on small sculptures of small men, the common men.
The amount of sculptures depends on the place. The place where the intervention happens has always an historical meaning to the town. For instance, the Dom Joao I Plaza, in Porto – Portugal, or the medieval plaza with the bronze lion, in Braunschweig.
In Sao Paulo there were 300 sculptures in April 2005. Later that year, 400 ice figures melted on the L’Opera Stairs and Mairie du Novienne, in Paris. In June 2006 more than 500 melting man were placed in Braunschweig Plaza and in September there were 1000 sculptures melting in the city of Porto. In Firenze, Italy, 1200 ice sculptures were placed in the stairs of Instituti delle Inocenti at the Piazza della Santíssima Annunziata, built by the renaissance architect Brunelleschi! As it always happens, the people who were there were invited to help build the monument, placing the ice figures.
When there are more sculptures, the bigger the impact, and it reaches a monumental scale, but with the sculptures starting to melt in 30 minutes you need to be quick to see them… If you think about it, it is scary!
These installations were done in collaboration with the WWF to highlight global warming.

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