Beyond the Visible | Receptacles
Beyond the visible | Receptacles
Project sketch
We have known since the 19th century that the production of industrial goods mostly produces toxic waste. With the passage of time the industrial waste is growing worldwide, as in most cases it needs centuries or millenniums to become unharmful. Marking the poisoned areas on a map makes you realise that the poisoned environment covers up a huge area worldwide.
In Italy, a study has been carried out on the subject of environmental pollution, in which the data of researchers, biologists and chemists are brought together with those of doctors and health insurers and the effects on health are examined. There are many cities and countrysides where survival is threatened because water, land or air are contaminated. Not only large-scale industry is mainly responsible for this situation, toxic waste is indeed a good business. Bringing household waste to a landfill and storing it costs around € 10 a ton, while storing toxic waste costs around € 300 a ton. Considering that every garbage transport needs to be controlled to ensure that no one has simply exchanged the shipping documents and that toxic waste is stuck as household waste, it quickly becomes clear that such a fraud can be carried out easily. An example: The total income of the ‘Ndrangheta, a criminal organisation from Calabria which operates would-wide in the filed of illegal traffic of toxic waste, exceeds that of the biggest companies.
And they are not the only ones: white collars, corrupt politicians, banks - a whole net of “workers” ensures that the waste “disappears” in near or, even better!, far away countries. Often these countries are former ex-colonies of those who produce most of the refuse.
Furthermore.
What about the "agent orange", used in Vietnam by US forces, or Assad's chemical weapons that have been "neutralised" in the Mediterranean Sea?
The relicts from the past, also, are still present. The cold war fueld the nuclear arms race: America carried out 1,039 nuclear tests to examine the effectiveness of its weapons until 2012 (!). The Soviet Union detonated 718 bombs, France 196, and few matter if many tests have been underground. Islands, veritable terrestrial paradises, have been evacuated and used to test nuclear weapons. These places are no longer habitable.
But what happens when humans exclude themselves because the soil and water are too contaminated to live in? Researchers found that places like Chernobyl have become sanctuaries for animals and plants. This contradicts the widely held idea that the end of humanity corresponds to the end of all life.
Can an Eden really only be imaginable without human beings?
The artwork
The installation consists of a large number of ceramic sculptures-containers. Each piece has a unique shape and colour, inspired by the morphology and history of the places it describes - contaminated, poisoned lands, which nevertheless in most cases retain their incredible beauty.
Some ceramics evoke a decorative object, which colour however appears a little too charged to be pleasant. Other sculptures resemble beings that might have escaped from a bizarre splatter movie. The choice to emulate a pop or even kitsch object expresses the common trivialisation of a huge problem such as the modification of the environment by man, a phenomenon is not only linked to a lack of information, criminal organisations and governments, but is at the basis of an unsustainable and not far-sighted economic system. The power of this economy lies in the seduction of the consumer through a continuous and extreme simplification of complex contents and desires.
The "strangeness" and complexity of the shapes of the containers invite you to observe longer, to discover, to investigate the mystery.
The containers are empty inside. In my work, emptiness represents fear of the unknown, intangible danger. Poisons are often invisible and the effect on human beings usually only occurs after a long time, which is why the connection to the origin of the problem is lost.
The sculptures are arranged on the ground in space, with geographical logic, based on the territories they represent. Alltogether, being smaller and bigger pieces they resemble a weird colourful landscape. The measures of the pieces vary between 70x40x30 cm to quite small ones, 10x5 cm ca.
Network (coming)
As a big part of the work is research, I am working on the implementation of a blog, that shows the information I collected from articles, books, documentary films. It is planned also to create a map, where the polluted areas worldwide become visible.