ART-BASED STREET COMMUNICATION

Spain 2008



Paris 2009


Paris 2009

Berlin 2009

Parc de la Villette in Paris used to be a huge slaughterhouse.
Much more to see on their web.
Image Credit Flickr User Neozoon

 
I added this one for Kieran.

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DEAD ON ARRIVAL

I love reading Grist and really admire Bill McKibben's engagement as much as I think the Cape Farewell project is meaningful, so reading the suggested articles “What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art (and I initially read Street art!) and Renee's interview with David Buckland felt it was -right on- for me (will save this one for next post).  It felt a close as can be to my teaching matters and thesis interests. I agreed with McKibben's claim that in terms of Climate change/Global warming feels that “oddly, though we know about it, we don’t know about it.  It hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture”.

When McKibben asks “Where are the books? The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” I figured this could take a few posts even just to get the on the surface of the subject, it got me really into it, hoping to share with Renee some other work I really appreciate (thinking Renee might be my only reader :-> for this course blog from now on).  Some Street-Art or Urban Intervention, (Gorilla Graffiti style, name them all...) examples I use for my class content and presentations or have shared on my course blog to get the students going on the projects they are asked doing themselves, since that is exactly what they do. (Art or design can be a matter of framing as well). They are asked to find creative ways to engage through their visual communications and through Urban Intervention engaged projects.  It won't be giving this blog a literary oriented angle as it perhaps could, but images are another way of trying to communicate our concerns, fears, musings, just as it is a short attempt to start answering McKibbens' question at the same time, I figured. A way which therefore felt the most appropriate.

 So I was hoping to start with a few projects for this penultimate post (or posts). UpCycling, a word used a lot in French as a trendy anglicism (I don't like anglicism in the French language, everything is -ing- now.  I even once read -green dating-... but my reaction to anglicism would be subject to another post.) ...Nevertheless, UpCycling* is of great interest since it aims improving the life cycle of -products- or services, or in such case, sends a creative message while adopting a coherent responsible way of doing so.  I saw this project a few years back, a life-free fur, which had a strong resonance for me. The use of fur, under this artistic form of communication, somewhere between recycling, awareness and critical provoking o thinking campaign, was inviting to reflection.  Neozoon is known to be a 2008 Parisien and Berlin born collective of artists, whom use the urban spaces, streets, web and public institutions as well, to question humans' relationship to animals (here with used furcoats).  Neozoon's original website (2008) would open with a quote from one of my favorite film when I was young "Planet of the Apes" **.   I mean, the 1968 original one of the recent one I haven't seen, although I usually love Tim Burton's work. (The original version of the film (by Franklin J.Schaffner I read on the net) will lead to a series of feature films long before the 2002 remake of it, as we know.)

* UpCYcling
I found it interesting to paste the UpCycling definition Oxford definition gives for UpCycling : “reuse (discarded objects or material) in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the original”.  If indeed the artistic and awareness use of reused fur was of higher value then any fur coat, -in some people's framing (like mine per example)-,  nothing could ever have higher value then the animal itself...

** From the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle

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Short  Neozoon interview from Wooster Collective on Good Is (photos de Vitostreet)

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