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My practice at the time had a deep effect on my lifestyle as I became increasingly more self-aware of contemporary issues, like environmental degradation worldwide, after carrying out a deep research about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. This is mainly due to the global environmental crisis we are facing today, which may lead to the extinction of the plants that grow from those seeds. I realized that in order for us to conserve and avoid environmental degradation we may need to dedicate more effort to improving our industries and transforming them into more eco-friendly ones. 

 

My research question was a response to the ironies we are nowadays often faced with as concerns sustainability and industrialization. 

 

This is problematic, however, as society is often faced with difficulties and challenging tasks created by us ourselves in the first place. As such, and in order for conservation to be successfully implemented nowadays, I argue, industrialization needs to step in to avoid the inherent catastrophic loss of biodiversity in our planetary habitat. A balance between nature and industry is thus required.

 

Given this, I explored those ideas – through different materials such as copper, other metals, oil colours, photograph, sound, video image and environmentally friendly paper. But I became attached to this “environmentally friendly paper” as it was kind of hard to manipulate and to manage. Its fragility gave me food for thought and made me obsessed with it. I decided afterwards to construct a three “little metal chair”. I found it interesting to play around with materials such as the eco-paper, seeds and industrial metal, the contrast between them went from hard and soft – the opposite of my earlier experience. 

 

How could they work together? What was their relationship? One of interdependence? Did the industrialization and sustainable materials I used work together as one and ensure conservation was achieved? Yes? No? Illusion maybe?  

 

So, the installation that I created for the first assessment explores this relationship between industrialization and conservation techniques nowadays embedded in our society. The outcomes of this show us that even ‘materials’ deemed as ‘ecological’ are a product of industrial manufacture and that brings our attention to the fact that the production processes behind such materials require mechanized manipulation. The two worlds of ‘industry’ and ‘ecological’ need to overlap and coexist in the present so conservation will happen before it is too late. 

 

My work was a critique of the misplacement we are often face due to our errors about the environment. It is also important to note that I created a chair-like structure (with the official measurements industrial designers normally use) as a way to symbolize and to provoke viewers about the lack of action that comes with the fear of stepping out of one's comfort zone. The vulnerability present in stepping out of that zone is often frowned upon, as it has become 'normal' to 'do the talk and not walk the walk' due to our fearing of the unknown.