Crochet coral reef in the special exhibition Anthropocene Annalisa Arcella Man warmed the planet, raised sea levels, eroded the ozone layer and acidified the oceans. My interest in learning more about this topics induced me to visit the Anthropocene exhibition. Surprisingly, walking through the exhibition, some exhibits caught my attention and diverted my interest away the topics addressed above. I had the impression to walk through art installations. ###MORE### Satellite photos of floating fish farms in Formosa Strait, Houses in Boca Raton in Florida and the Vineyards in Huelva, Spain are on display like an Art gallery. They look like original paintings giving an image of the earth as a global garden. On the other hand fashion clothes made by plastic bottles and the original art-bike build with old bicycle parts found in the street, are the real expression of the art of the recycling.
Norrona Company kindly lent the Museum a blue jacket and handmade shoes completely produced with recycled material, to be exposed at the Anthropocene exposition. Norrona Company’s project gave birth to a clothing range made of recycled products. They collected over 70000 plastic bottles in Norway and sent the bottles in a journey halfway around the world, to be turned into fabric and then sewn into jacket. This process resulted into 100% recycled clothes. “Our society will be defined not only by what we create, but also by what we refuse to destroy”, the artist Victor Sonna says. Originally from Cameroon, Sonna expresses his artistic vision collecting old bicycle scraps around the street of his new hometown in the Netherland. He offers a new view of the city, a generative place for creative and new ideas to face environmental problems that are rising in the Anthropocene.
The masterpiece of the Art & Science, in my opinion, is the Crochet Coral Reef. Fascinated by the colours and the complex shape of this exhibit, I spent a long while observing it in details trying to understand the mathematical secret behind its motifs and I learnt about the key role coral reef plays in the marine food chain that human depends upon.
This colourful installation is only a part of a large project created by Wertheim sisters of the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles and has been exhibited in several Museums worldwide, including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Hayward Gallery of London. This wool archipelago is the fruit of feminine handicraft that combine complex mathematical shapes and the beauty of marine ecosystem to chisel Crochet Coral Reef at once visually powerful and ecologically pertinent.
Visiting the Anthropocene exhibition I enjoyed how human genius and creativity merge to give a new view of the city where people engage with disused objects sometimes found in the street. In the Anthropocene people are handicraftsmen that transform wool in coral and garbage into futuristic bicycles.
Welcome to the Anthropocene. The Earth in Our Hands
Is on display in Level 1
Special exhibitions area
Annalisa Arcella , Italian, is volunteering as English-speaking blogger. After her master degree in Physics at University of Napoli, she moved to Barcelona to complete a PhD in Biophysics and joined the MIT in Boston as visiting post-doc. Since college she is passionate for science communication especially in Science Museums and events. Annalisa recommends to visit the Nanotechnology exhibition: the Nanocosm is a world made by special element small like a grain of sand that have the immense potential to create smart objects chiselled like a sculpture, as microchips or to discover the bricks of the Human Genome.