Ackroyd & Harvey
Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey’s artworks refer to global environmental concerns and socio-political paradigms in our current days. They tend to exhibit through their work the anthropogenic climate change and explore their interests in local ecologies as apart of their extended research in biology, ecology, culture, architecture and history. Moreover, they often use living materials like grass seeds to compose and to form their installations. They are most known for their monumental architectural interventions in public spaces such as Aarhus art museum in Denmark.
Frank Sandback
Frank Sandback was a major minimalistic artist that made sculptures and 3-dimensional installation spaces using everyday basic materials including elastic cords and coloured yarns. His work was a response to the perceptual effects of architecture alongside with the sensory experience of illusion across interior gallery spaces.
His work made me understand how one can create multidimensional minimal spaces using everyday objects that are mostly available to all.
Sandback stated once - “My work is full of illusions, but they don’t refer to anything. Fact and illusion are equivalents.”
Widow Basquiat
A Memoir By Jennifer Clement
It is a really well-written love story between the avant-garde street artist and painter Jean Michel Basquiat and his long-troubled relationship with Suzane. The story of Suzanne it's about her problematic/unsafe childhood in Canada to her arrival in America and how she meets this iconic artist that died later on with a drug overdose.
Love, obsession, sex, discrimination, addiction where the powerful hard reality they lived in New York City during the 80s. Often, the author talks about how Basquiat had problems to deal with his success because he was the first successful African American artist in this elitist art world. Being a bi-cultural or mix brought to both identify problems and to figurate out their position in society that was dominated by predominately white people.
Svalbard Global Seed Vault
The Seed Vault located in Svalbard, Norway, was initially created to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds from all around the world, containing too some of the last samples of ‘on the way to extinction’ seeds. This is mainly due to the global environmental crisis we are facing today, which may lead to the extinction of said seeds.
Spitsbergen is considered an ideal location because it does not have a huge amount of tectonic activity and due to its permafrost nature – meaning it has the perfect temperature to conserve plant seeds without them losing their ‘reproductive’ value.
The vault it able to preserve the seeds for a minimum amount of 100 years up to a potential maximum amount of 1000 years.
However, and despite the good intentions of such cause and practices, the mediums used to preserve the seeds are far from being environmentally friendly. Indeed, this puts us in an ethical dilemma as one is often faced with the task of deciding between preserving nature for future generations (i.e. by saving seeds) or avoiding damage to current generations – although the impacts by affect those in the future as well – (i.e. by creating non-environmental structures that paradoxically aim to preserve nature).
