With the aim of promoting the message of anti-littering, Museum of Goa, Pilerne is spearheading a project to create a Carpet of Joy, a land art installation near the Saligao Circle
TGLife
Take a drive around your city or village and you’re bound to find waste strewn around the roads or pavements at some point. This, despite messages put up requesting people not to do so and despite many activists striving to educate people against littering.
In a new initiative towards cleaning up Saligao and indeed cleaning up Goa, Museum of Goa, Pilerne together with the Saligao Panchayat and the German company Putzmeister have partnered with 2000 local school students to create a land art installation called the Carpet of Joy, created out of painted plastic bottles near the Saligao Circle.
Originally conceived by Israeli artist Uri De Beer, the installation consists of 1,50,000 plastic bottles which will stretch 100 meters into a field, rising 12 meters into the sky at one end and circumventing a tree to compare the organic with the toxic.
“ Uri de Beer visited the museum a few months ago and during my interaction with him, he showed me his installation works which he had done with children, all over the world including outside the Israeli Parliament in Tel Aviv. I was impressed with these works and decided to try out something similar here in Goa,” states Subodh Kerkar, director of Museum of Goa.
To begin with the museum partnered with 10 schools around the village to organise a waste management programme together with an NGO. The students were taught about waste management in a two day programme at their school, taken to visit the waste treatment site in Saligao, and on the third day, the programme shifted to the museum. “The children were asked to bring waste from their homes to the museum where we then together created crafts out of it,” informs Noreen van Holstein who was in charge of this. The Carpet of Joy was then born out of this.
“ Through this project we are taking baby steps to correct ourselves to reduce waste and get closer to nature,” says Beula Knauf, consulatant at Putzmeister. They chose to involve children in this as they are the future.
“ The only way to get to message of anti littering is through educating the children because most adults are beyond this,” says Kerkar, while Beula add that children also learn fast.
And while the message is certainly not new, Kerkar states that it will take time, but we will definitely get there. “ About 20-25 years ago, people in other countries like the US also used to throw bottles outside the window. It took time to learn the ill effects of this,” he says, adding that in achieving this objective it is important to take the help of government programmes like Swachh Bharat, and other activists too.
Work on the installation began on March 1 and will continue over the next couple of weeks. Once complete the installation will remain on display for three months as a cultural emblem for environmental care and an educational campaign against littering. Apart from this, there will also be talks and other activities related to waste management at the site.
And Kerkar already has another related programme which he hopes to put into motion soon. “Someone has donated some cameras to me and I plan to set these up at different places where people often throw garbage and click pictures of them while in the act. Their pictures along with their names will then be part of an exhibition at the Museum of Goa. Of course, I will not do this behind their back. They will be told about it before the picture is clicked,” says Kerkar, adding, “I am just an artist and am using art to bring people together and to pass on the message.”
