“Come and walk through my installation and feel like a fish must feel
in the ocean,” asks artist Sonja Weder. Distressed by the growing amount of
plastic waste she is constantly seeing around her, the artist was driven to
create an installation outside her store, Sotohaus, in Candolim.
“Earlier, in markets, people used to wrap vegetables, bread and
fish in newspaper and everyone was managing. Now, people so unthinkingly use a
plastic bag and discard it; single use plastic is so bad for our environment.
So many plants and animals are dying. Cows eat it unknowingly, and finding
plastic in their stomachs is so common now. Our oceans are full of it. That’s
why I created this installation so you can walk through all this plastic and
feel like a fish does swimming through an ocean full of it,” says an anguished
Sonja.
Titled ‘Nature Needs Us
Now’, the installation features a plethora of plastic items – toys, packaging material
for cleaning agents, creams, lotions, food products, water bottles and so much
more hanging from an overhead grid. From a distance, the storefront looks
colourful, inviting and completely ‘instagrammable’. The installation looks
playful and breezy as the bottles sway with the wind.
It is only when you come
closer that you are staggered by the sheer amount of plastic humans generate –
almost all of it completely unnecessary. Hanging amidst all the waste is a
clock, set at 5 minutes to 12, which ticks on like a bomb, reminding us of the
urgency with which to act to “save our Mother Earth, we are really running out
of time!”
The unnerving
installation with its powerful imagery stops viewers in their tracks and while
inviting them to look a little closer, immerses them in the intolerable
situation we have created for ourselves. It is an interesting departure for the
artist who has always worked with natural materials.
The Swiss artist and her
husband Thomas Schnider made Goa their home a couple of decades ago. They run
the very successful design led Sotohaus which offers an interesting selection
of art, furniture, lighting and accents for the home, all designed and
manufactured by them, and distinctive for their use of natural materials. Says
Sonja, “I’m a big admirer of fauna and flora. For years now, I have been using
only natural waste like seeds, leaves and pods in my work. I even invented a
technique to preserve the leaves for furniture and lamps. I never thought I
would ever use plastic as a material for an installation, but on my strolls
‘hunting’ for leaves and seeds suddenly I came across this new material!”
Finding more and more
plastic rather than the earth friendly materials she was looking for, Sonja
decided to use it as her medium of expression. The work makes for a striking
statement.
She leaves viewers with something to think
about, urging them to act and do their bit. “It’s the greatest of all mistakes
to do nothing because you can only do little. Do what you can.”
