Mary Mattingly is an American artist. Born in 1978, she lives and works in New York City. Alice Audouin: You are a pioneer of ecological art in New York City. Since 2003, you have mainly created public art, with a strong participatory scope. Mary Mattingly: When I started, my work was not perceived as fine [...]
Chuan Lun Wu is a contemporary artist born in Tainan (Taiwan) in 1985. He lives and works between Tainan and Berlin. Alice Audouin: You are from Taiwan, a country that has experienced huge environmental and industrial transformations. Chuan Lun Wu: I grew up in Tainan, a city in southern Taiwan. Since I was young, Taiwan [...]
Haroon Mirza, a leading figure in contemporary art, was born in London in 1977, where he lives and works. Alice Audouin: How and when did you start integrating solar energy in your work ? Haroon Mirza:I fell into it by accident! I had to set up an installation at Villa Savoye, a space where using [...]
You're a pioneer of art in relation to the environment, commencing from when you were a student with the work Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007). In this artwork, you connected a live telephone line to an Icelandic glacier, via an underwater microphone. Anyone in the world could then call a number and hear the sound [...]
Yao Lu (姚璐), born in 1967 in Beijing, is a Beijing-based artist and Professor of Photography at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Yao Lu creates landscapes from landfills and piles of litter, covering them with a green net before photographing them from different angles. Next, he creates a photomontage made up of details taken [...]
Clouds represent the focus of your artistic research. Why? For me, clouds expose the unknown. They are always in motion, constantly in a state of becoming. For some years now, I have been having conversations with climate scientists. Our discussions revealed that there are so many processes in the atmosphere which remain unknown. This idea [...]
In your personal exhibition here in Venice, "Medusa Alga Laguna", you show a particular interest in the jellyfish and algae of the lagoon ecosystem. Sargassum algae is an invasive species that arrived recently here in Venice, which is creating major problems in the lagoon, just like jellyfish, which are also on the rise. Their proliferation [...]
The name of your duo, Recycle Group, refers to the environment. It is very pioneering, did you intend from the start to address environmental issues? Our name is that of our first exhibition, Recycle , in 2008 in Moscow. This idea of recycling is constitutive of our approach. For us, it goes further than a [...]
Your work raises awareness of the effects of globalization, including its consequences on the environment and urbanization. How did these issues appear in your work? In the 1990s, the end of the Cold War moved the world from confrontation to integration. The rise of the internet and the easier access to transportation increased international communication. [...]
What role do environmental issues play in your work? Current challenges - such as the melting glaciers, the extinction of plant species, the mutation of animals or pandemics, and how humanity is called to coexist with these realities - become a territory of endless learning for me and my artistic exploration becomes a way of [...]
