An interactive intervention with place-mats and people at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011.

Mapping exhibition: ARTLIFEfortheworld

The first thing one experiences entering Venice, is water. From the Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia, the main train station, it’s a 20 step walk to the Grand Canal, which runs like a snake through the island. My artist’s intervention, “Map and Sip”, which put nearly 1000 placemats with an image of the ocean’s gyres in dozens of cafes and restaurants around Venezia, would call attention to those very waters now dying from pollution. The oceans are now filled with the world’s refuse. And it’s not just jelling in the big Pacific Gyre island as has been promoted by the media, but worse, yet, it’s like a soup: and everywhere. So we put some information on the problem on these placemats with one of my new paintings inspired by the satellite maps of the scientists Maxemenko and Hefner from the University of Hawai’i. And I took them to the 54th Venice Biennale. As Captian Charles Moore at Algalita Marine Research Foundation says, “Everything goes downhill to the ocean” eventually. So any of us who throw away plastic, and don’t refuse using it, are putting something into our oceans that is destroying them, and ultimately us.

My first successful “intervention” was at GianCarlo’s restaurant near the Rialto bridge, and not far from the gallery where I was showing the original painting of the “Plastic Gyres” series. He took heart to the idea and enthusiastically starting showing his other customers the map and explaining the idea. Italians of course love art, and if it has to do with water, they get it. From there on, it was easy. During the course of the day I covered dozens of cafes and restaurants around Venice, placing the maps out, for customers to enjoy, while sipping and reading. Waiters and waitresses all over town became my friends and passed them out for each new customer. I left a particularly large bunch of placemats for McDonald’s. I left them at fast food pizzerias for weekend tourists and fancy eats at the Giardinni, where the monied art crowd gathers. Piazza San Marco was not left untouched.

At least a couple of thousand people saw the placemats that day, as I talked up the cafes. Venezia is also filled with sidewalk hawkers, immigrants effected by climate change, mainly from Africa, selling their wares. It’s been a city of trade for millennia, connecting continents and cultures via the sea- the link to the world. And now, even with the waters rising due to climate change and Venice itself threatened, the connection of plastic pollution to destruction of that sea still hasn’t been made in the public’s mind. The commerce of information was brought back to the human level in this project, a one-on-one confrontation with the public.

COMMUNITY ECOLOGIES

Rhine River Requiem

Mni Wiconi

WxW Riparian Corridor

Flow: Land to Sea

Map and Sip

Gyres

Chemicals

SS Palo Alto ArtPark

Dialogue

Swan Songs

ARTMILL

Safe Planet