Curating the Beach

Weekly Excerpts #10: 07/03/2019

We have 8 days to go before the book launch of our guide. We want you to know exactly what to expect from the book and to get to know the amazing people behind this project! Every week you will be able to check in on our website in order to find a new essay, article, artist or business from the guide.

This week’s excerpt is about the artist lina klauss. liina studied Fashion-Design at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and has worked for fashion brands in Berlin and Tokyo. She moved to Hong Kong in 2007 and started to make environmental installations on beaches using marine litter in 2011. Her installations have been part of multiple international festivals and conferences in Europe and Asia. She collaborates with various schools, universities and corporates facilitating art-awareness-activism projects. liina is currently living in Bali, Indonesia with her family, where she works as an Artist-in-Residence at Bali Greenschool. She was chosen as a The Universal Sea Artist-in-Residence. 

Broken Dreams No.1 – About the artwork by liina klauss

 

Curating the Beach – Essay by liina klauss

Art makes you perceive the unknown as known, the familiar as strange. It is like walking in someone else’s shoes, like looking at the world through someone else’s eyes. Art changes perception and inspires change. 

In 2014 I put up a hawker stall in Hong Kong. These ‘dai pai dong’ are a common sight on Hong Kong’s streets, typically painted green and crammed to the rim with ‘stuff’ to buy. Situated on Stanley’s waterfront promenade, right between the ocean and a shopping mall, my stall is filled with colours from top to bottom. It looks like a beautiful rainbow. What is for sale there? People approach with a mindset of being able to purchase, to possess. 

Jaws drop when these ‘customers’ realise that the items they are adoring are all marine litter: 

Lighters, plastic bottles, buoys, broken toys, driftwood, plastic straws and shells all retrieved from a single beach in Hong Kong during only one beach-clean. 

Each of the found objects is labeled with a price tag, which does not state a number in dollars but concepts like ‘awareness’ or ‘responsibility’. I am ‘selling’ single objects to visitors, complete with my signature, in exchange for the visitor’s own interpretation of these concepts. I received everything from drawings, to poems, to complete manuals how to build a boat from marine litter. 

lost’n’found is an intervention in the ordinary shopping experience, questioning what we worship and what we value in our current consumerist society. 

Art is the trigger that changes perspective. Changing perspective is the first and most fundamental step towards innovation. 

We have been looking at the world through the lens of economic growth and monetary profit since the start of industrialisation. After 150 years of mass production it is becoming increasingly obvious that these practices do not work: global warming, acidification of the oceans, plastic gyres, death of coral reefs, overfishing, the list goes on. From the outside a healthy ocean looks the same as a dead ocean. The surface stays the same. But life itself on this planet cannot be sustained without healthy oceans. 

How can we make the unseen seen? How can I as an artist make people look at what they want to avert their gaze from? 

Again my answer is art. Curating the beach makes the apocalypse look like a rainbow. It makes the ugly truth of marine pollution look beautiful. Once you look it is too late: beauty
has already captured you in its net. Advertising is using the same technique. In contrast to an advertisement, I don’t want to sell you ‘stuff’. I want to sell you awareness; all change, all innovation starts with awareness. 

Curating the Beach is a process in which participants change their perception from ‘ordinary’ to ‘creative’ by looking at everything around them as if it were art. The findings on a beach range from everything that floats in the ocean to everything left behind on the beach by visitors. The biggest object we found was a refrigerator, the oddest, a pink dildo, and the oldest a 21cm diameter horse-shoe crab; a living fossil over 400 million years old. 

Whatever we find, everything is art material, no discrimination made. Wherever we find ourselves, be it on a beach, on the side of a road, a river or a dump, on sand, concrete, grass or wasteland, it will be our gallery. Trash is ubiquitous. Art should be ubiquitous too. And as a consequence, awareness will be too. 

The biggest object we found was a refrigerator, the oddest, a pink dildo, and the oldest a 21cm diameter horse-shoe crab; a living fossil over 400 million years old. 

On a personal level, Curating the Beach is empowering as it defies the odds of being the culprit. In the face of an immeasurable amount of rubbish caused by human ignorance, it is only natural to feel sick, ashamed, helpless, depressed. This helplessness is changed into actively being part of a creative solution: You touch. 

You are being touched. You see. You are a witness. You do not look away. You care. And, what might be a paradox, you are being taken care of. It is the presence of nature that heals, soothes and makes you feel being part of a bigger whole. Getting people physically out of the office or classroom, and psychologically out of their comfort zones, is as important if not more important than the result. It is as simple as being in an untouched and wild part of nature. It is using your own hands and visibly changing the environment that makes Curating the Beach so successful. 

‘Curating’ comes from the Latin word ‘curare’ meaning ‘to heal’ in its active form and ‘being healed’ in its passive form. The term was first used by Judith and Richard Lang who have been curating Kehoe Beach in California since 1999. For almost two decades this couple has been combing the beach for art materials using their finds for collages of marine debris, which are turned into photographs afterwards. Curating the Beach is, visually speaking, the opposite of a beach cleanup. The effect is not making waste disappear in black rubbish bags never to be seen again. ‘Curating’ treats waste as art material and the beach like a canvas. 

I have organised more than 30 of these Curating the Beach outings with corporates, schools and environmental groups. “There is no ‘away’” becomes a tangible reality when seeing a beach polluted by plastic and other man- made debris. And yet most people do not make a direct connection between marine pollution and their own daily habits. As long as we think it is ‘the other,’ as long as we keep pointing fingers, nothing will change. The human imprint cannot be ignored and we as humans cannot ignore our responsibility. 

Trying to make personal responsibility more tangible, I started to do installations solely with shoes. Shoes are objects we wear directly on our bodies. Much loved pairs often carry the imprint of our feet, the imprint of our attachment, of time that passed, of memories. 

In February 2017 we started to collect flip-flops from beaches on the West coast of Bali. On our first trip with school children from Bali Greenschool we salvaged 500 ‘lost soles’ from one single beach. Other trips with One Island One Voice and EcoBali followed. By that time we had collected around 2000 single flip- flops. Lastly, highly motivated employees from Potatohead Beach Club found over 3000 more soles. All in all it took six trips and less than 100 people to collect 5000 seaborne soles on a stretch of 10km coastline. 5000 lost soles is a permanent installation at Potatohead Beach Club in Seminyak, Bali. To make the flip-flops into a permanent structure meant finding a way to join them together. Innovation Hub at Bali Greenschool produces a 100% recycled thread made from melted bottle caps. Using this thread to sew the flip-flops into a carpet-like surface took another eight weeks. The structure underneath the carpet of sandals is made from locally sourced, sustainably grown and harvested bamboo here in Bali. Ibuku, the company behind it, uses traditional methods and local craftsmen to build with bamboo. Working in a sustainable, responsible and creative manner like this is beneficial for everyone involved. 

Bali is a small island and everything done here has a direct impact on the environment. It can be seen and felt directly, bad as well as good practices. 

5000 salvaged shoes means literally 5000 less shoes on the streets, washing down the rivers and into the ocean every day; 5000 less shoes being burnt and polluting the air; 5000 less shoes in the earth, slowly leaking their toxins into the soil. 

The challenges we face when it comes to plastic are mismanagement, durability and sheer mass. The lost soles project visually addresses mismanagement and mass. Here is a simple calculation for flip-flops in Indonesia. This footwear is commonly worn in warm climates of South-East Asia, is inexpensive and chosen by rich and poor, young and old, villagers and city-dwellers. Most flip- flops get discarded after three to four months due to material weakness. Let’s do the maths: 3.5 pairs of flipflops per person per year = seven single flip-slops. Seven flip-flops x 267 million (population of Indonesia 2018) = over 900 million discarded flip-flops in Indonesia alone. These flip-flops don’t go “away”. They are made from polyethylene foam that persists in the environment for hundreds of years without breaking down. 

Pete Seeger made the following statement in the 1960s, and if it was visionary back then, it is a matter of life and death today. “If it can’t be reduced, reused, repaired, rebuilt, refurbished, refinished, resold, recycled or composted, then it should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.” Plastic is a design failure. But it is also a ‘perception’ failure. If we start looking at waste from a perspective of value instead of waste we have a resource that is cheap (money), ubiquitous (place) and abundant (mass). As a global community of designers, manufacturers, retailers, consumers and waste managers we need to move from a linear economy to a circular economy.

Visit liina klauss’ website here. 

She also was just featured in a Hong Kong newspaper. See here. 

Stay tuned for more Weekly Excerpts.