Message in 30,000 Bottles
Not even the time to recover from Dutch Design Week, and here we are again setting up yet another plastic installation. This time it’s for Glow, a major international light art festival happening right at our doorstep in Eindhoven. You might be thinking, “What’s the link between light shows and plastic?”. Think again!
During the 7 days long festival, the 700.000 visitors walk around the city on a planned route through the many lighting installations. Much of the path is alongside one of those typical Dutch canals – clean, beautiful, and pristine. But as we know too well, most rivers around the world are not so lucky. Plastic, trash and pollution fill many rivers and canals around the planet (most probably also with some dutch exported trash).
In collaboration with Glow, we collected 30.000 PET bottles, secured them in nets, and threw them in the beautiful canal. We’ve erected a Precious Plastic flag in the mess (which meant a winter swim from Yann, Nate and Jason 🤣) and installed some fancy lighting for the dark hours to bring the space to life.
We took this opportunity to remind visitors that, although their canals are nice and clean, the broader global reality is very different. We hope this exhibition can awake people’s consciousness towards reducing their plastic addiction.
We claim this “trash” as precious. After the event, we will recollect and use this material to create a Precious Plastic installation for GLOW 2019. Making Plastic Precious. Not sure what to do yet (any ideas welcome, comment below).
Until then, let’s skip the bottled water. Shall we?
See you then 👋
Brilliant! Literally 😉
Great way to get the message across!
Thats a greate way to put it in perspective
Good work
This is a great Idea. We, that`s Hendrick Hackel and me, we are palling a project with recycled plastic bottles to be shredded and then we want to create a copy of a sculpture using 3D-scanning and 3D-printing technology. Therefor we need loads of plastic bottles. I was just wondering, where you got them from? I assume you got them for free.
Here in Germany for almost all beverages in PET-bottles we have to pay a deposit, so it would turn out quite expensive to have 50.000 (Ore even much more) of these bottles shredded for a sculpture.
Great!