"Global WarNing" is the achievement of more than 30 years of fighting to warn and educate about the colossal dangers of the consequences of global warming, even then considered marginal and alarmist back then.
My collaboration with multimedia artist Lénaïc G. Mercier, made possible for this exhibition to be a reality. It is not just a display of paintings inspired by nature, its beauty and its catastrophes, but a true immersive, interactive and educational installation.
IMMERSION
In the Global WarNing exhibition, spectators are cut off from reality from the moment they enter the show and immersed in a vibrant visual and sound universe.
The first painting of the exhibition reveals the sentence "What is Our Future", surrounded by pieces of broken material that are hiding a possible "?", offering the possibility for the spectator to choose the direction he wants to take for the future of our planet by having his own interpretation of this phrase, affirmation or question?
Throughout the exhibition, the visitor will be confronted with animated paintings, thanks to the process of Living Art, in an unprecedented anticipatory approach for each of the paintings on major themes such as land, sea and space pollution, the rise of the ocean level, global warming of the planet and the shrinking of the ozone hole, as well as disasters resulting from human activity.
As he travels to the heart of "Global WarNing", the viewer is surrounded by the distant echo of cetacean cries in the deep, muffled noise of the ocean depths.
INTERACTIVITY
Beyond the animated paintings representing scenes of anticipation, the visitor will be confronted with a quite striking physical and organic installation: a tornado.
Made of cold water vapor and circulating air streams, this tornado is totally sensitive to the atmospheric conditions that encircle it, giving it more or less power.
The more visitors gather around it, the more it loses its strength and density, until it practically disappears. When, on the contrary, only a few people are dispersed around it, the vortex is dense, powerful, almost frightening.
The inclusion of this interactive tornado in the exhibition leads us to reflect on the notion of group and unity. The more we will be together, the more we will be able not to control nature, but to preserve it from the most destructive disasters for both nature and humanity. We will not be able to do it alone.
EDUCATION
Our main weapon in the fight against global warming is not some green technology or some umpteenth so-called ecological innovation that turns out to be more polluting than the one it replaces in the long term. No, our main weapon is in a single word: EDUCATION.
In the process of developing "Global WarNing", we have forged two valuable partnerships with the Alliance Française de Philadelphie, a place of learning and culture, to host the creation of the exhibition and PhilaFlam, a French-language teaching school for young people up to 18 years old, where we had the tremendous privilege of leading two sessions with some 50 schoolchildren to discuss with them the challenges of global warming and the simple actions to be introduced in their daily lives.
These very rich interactions confirmed to us that we should never underestimate the power of the children's minds and their extraordinary ability to understand, analyze and act in complete freedom from social, political or economic pressure.
These discussions resulted in the children's creative involvement in the exhibition, through drawings and paintings, which illustrated their own vision of the climate and its upheavals.
"Global WarNing" is, far beyond a simple exhibition, a real educational tool for the children and adults.
ABINGTON ART CENTER
October 2022
Curated by Westby & Mercier
