Weekend art happening

MONDAY & FRIDAY ...with OLAFUR EGILL and BJARNI MASSI

Monday is MOON day....WATER...MOODS...EMOTIONS...
Friday is Freya's day... EARTH, Beauty, Love, Sovereignty From Monday to Friday.

The themes we were offered to work with were Monday/Friday. Earth and Water. One of our group members - Linda, gave a small lecture on Agenda 21 and then we immediately started working. We decided that Mondays and Fridays were opposites; one a happy day and the other a sad day - a party and a hangover - wet and then dry. But we also decided not to go for a 1:1 ratio between what we would do, and what the supposed intention or overall motive of the finished work would be. i.e. we would give our rational and censoring right brain a vacation and work with more abstract things - whatever would be fun in truth - and trust our subconscious to get the message across to the viewers on a different level than the one of reason and logic.

We, the leaders - Ólafur Egill and Bjarni Massi also had two ideas that we dropped in the pot - Bjarni wanted to do a tunnel and I wanted to use the tents that we knew were lying in the basement of the youth hostel where we were working. So a tent-tunnel was inevitably suggested.

Then the work began, and fortunately the action of erecting the tent-tunnel, took over the labored process of logically thinking through what you are doing and what it means, which inevitably leads to censorship and stifling of the process.

We had a good group and little by little our work drifted nearer to dealing with the concepts we had set out with in the beginning - Agenda 21 and related environmental issues.
At the end we had a tunnel that began with the remains of a party - cans on the floor of the tent tunnel and began increasingly narrower and more constrained and more difficult to crawl through. Pipes that stuck into the tunnel were filled with voices continually spilling words into the tent tunnel - pollution - everybody uses to much washing powder - ground control to major Tom - you are stuck - where are you going - go with the flow and so on. A television spilled an electronic hiss into the room and the sounds of water running and metal tides coming in and receeding all blended together. - In some way the tunnel had the feeling of being a sewage pipe leading out to the sea.

After crawling through the audience could then see, through a window outside the tunnel space, that a small party had been set up in the area around the tunnel, with a wc in the center and a nearby picture of Geysir gushing into the air. Nature vs. man-made water manipulation or some such train of thought.

We tackled the objective of our workshop: Reflect on agenda 21 and make others think about the environment, in the following two ways: 1) We searched for ways to express our overall feelings towards the environment and environmental policies in general subtly without preaching or being banal. 2 ) We had fun doing it and tried to entertain our audience as well.

EARTH

• About 90% of the rubbish in an average bin can be recycled.
• Compost all organic waste from house/business - high fibre composting is best - mix in cardboard to provide better structure.
• Local flows- keep things local, buy locally grown, organic fruit and veg, or even better, grow your own.
• Use local, untreated timber for construction purposes where possible.
• Reclaim and reuse wood - in the UK, 500 tonnes of construction wood waste is produced daily, only 20 tonnes is reclaimed.
• Buy re-usable and recycled products.
• Every plastic nappy ever used is still in existence in landfill.
• Every tonne of paper recycled saves 17 trees.
• Use rechargeable batteries, or recycle old ones - 20,000 tonnes of highly polluting batteries are landfilled every year in the UK.
• 25 plastic drinks bottles are used to make one fleece.
• The average lifetime for a garment is about 3 years.
• Aluminium can be recycled indefinitely, as reprocessing doesn´t damage the structure. Schemes also pay collectors money in some areas.
• Avoid overpackaging, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle.

Websites:

• www.wastewatch.org.uk
• www.recycledproducts.org.uk

WATER

Toilets: a standard toilet uses 8-15 litres per flush. USE: eco-toilets (dual flush), compost toilets, ´hippos´, ´Aquatron´, reedbeds.
Taps: a tap left running can waste 10 litres a minute. USE: ´magic´ taps - respond to heat of hands, push-taps.
Showers: the energy used for a 5 minute power-shower is equivalent to that used by an average man running continually for 290 days. USE: low-flow shower heads.

• Only use washing machines/dishwashers when you have a full load.
• Only use eco-friendly cleaning products to cut water pollution.
• Harvest rain water for use on garden.
• Re-use ´grey´water from house - washing-up water, etc - to water garden.
• Install solar water heating panels to roof.
• Renewable energy from hydro sources/wave power.

Websites:

• www.environment-agency.gov.uk/savewater
• www.oneworld.org