Site-specific art made from plastic waste during an art residency for the Natural History Museum in Lisbon.
'New Biodiversity,' is an installation made uniquely for the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon consisting of plastic animal species. It displays, as it were, a future nature museum collection. This collection is arranged by species and given a 'fictitious' Latin name as a presentation in a nature museum is intended to be. I made this site-specific work from plastic waste collected on site during my stay in artist residence at Zaratan Arte Contemporanea. With this exhibition, I call attention to our plastic addiction and the consequences it has for our future.
I liked my 2017 artist residency in Aarhus so much that I initiated a project of my own for the Natural History Museum in Lisbon. I had discovered this exhibition space through social media and I thought it would be great to create new work for this. A year of preparation preceded. Applying for grants and building a network of Portruvese who could help me collect trash from the streets and beaches. Five weeks I stayed in Lisbon and collected plastic waste with the help of new portuguese friends also the embassy collected with me. Perhaps the most beautiful find was a large quantity of glass jars in the container of the museum itself. They were jars in which reptiles had been sitting in strong water; they still had stickers with names and places of discovery on them. I refilled these jars with plastic waste. In the beginning of this work period I made art that embroidered on what I had already made in the Netherlands, such as Hunting trophies because after all they belong in a Nature Museum, but over time I created new objects such as jellyfish but also skeletons and blood vessel systems.
December 6, 2018 - January 20, 2019 The opening was performed by Christianne Bleijenbergh, Deputy Ambassador. At the invitation of the Dutch Embassy, part of this exhibition was on display a few months later during the EEF congress at the University of Lisbon.
