Extreme Green Guerillas
Michiko Nitta – uk, 2007
We are forced to face the reality on a daily basis that environmental damage is more advanced than experts predicted. As global warming becomes the top of almost every government’s agenda, recent trends have put pressure on world leaders to act immediately: for instance, forced recycling, carbon offsetting and a 10-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable.
Are these efforts really improving the environment? Are these activities saving the Earth? What is eco-friendly living? When we live in a period where the worst climate disaster is about to happen, how can we live the ultimate green lifestyle?
Nitta’s project takes current green trends to the extreme. The Extreme Green Guerillas are a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened their lifespan through the ultimate green lifestyle. Whilst going to extreme lengths to protect the environment, they try to enjoy a decadent quality of life by re-using urban waste and biosystems, embracing emerging technologies in order to develop the ultimate green solution.
The Extreme Green Guerillas reject use of the corporation-controlled internet or CO2-producing postal services, instead preferring to send digital messages via migratory animals. By modifying urban vermin, such as pigeons and rats, they create edible and gourmet-like new delicacies. They attempt to solve overpopulation and resource problems through a ritualistic, premature death, administered via a euthanasing earring. The purpose of these individual, provocative gestures is to question the role of consumerism within green activities and to provoke questions regarding green lifestyles. The position the guerillas represent is realised through an ironic, playful and artistic use of creative, self-explanatory systems.
[TM.09 exhibition : ‘Survival and Utopia : Visions of Balance in Transformation’]
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