The artists Xhixha and Braglia, authors in the Grand Canal a Venezia installation. The Twin Bottles: Message in a Bottle, two large metal sculptures depicting two floating bottles made to raise awareness of the problem of pollution of the world's seas (our previous article), have also joined the project TartaLove symbolically adopting the two turtles and guaranteeing for one year the coverage of the costs of medicines and food for all the specimens hospitalized in the Recovery Centre.
“With the adoption of the two sea turtles – declare Xhixha and Braglia – we wanted to make a concrete gesture to further strengthen the provocative environmental message that we launched from Venice with our new work The Twin Bottles: Message in a Bottle. These two enormous floating sculptures bring strong attention to the theme of pollution of the world's seas contaminated by plastics, an increasingly central topic present today in the debate on the protection of the planet and the oceans”.
The project TartaLove is a fundraising campaign to help sea turtles that Legambiente launched recently. Through the symbolic adoption of a sea turtle, it allows the association to continue to care for these animals, protect their nests and sensitize fishermen so that they can deliver turtles accidentally captured to the nearest Recovery Center for treatment and rehabilitation.
Helidon and Jack, who took their names from their benefactors, had been caught a few weeks ago during a trawling trip off the coast of Mattinata and immediately admitted to the Sea Turtle Recovery Center in Manfredonia, where it was discovered that they had ingested plastic that were jeopardizing their life, extremely precious since they are endangered specimens. Hence the cures and their rescue thanks to the donation of the two artists.
And plastic is one of the most dangerous threats of recent years. “Bags, remains of bottles and crockery, cotton swabs, fishing lines and various types of packaging – comments Stefano Di Marco, Coordinator of the Tartalove campaign of Legambiente – are increasingly found in the stomachs of animal specimens which, like Helidon and Jack, are hospitalized in the Recovery Center of Manfredonia where our operators have documented that more than 80% of the recovered specimens have swallowed these materials. The ingestion of these materials can be lethal because it can cause death by suffocation or intestinal blockage or again, as in the case of the two specimens released today, cause serious buoyancy problems.”
