Maria Badalamenti, artistic name Vittor, arrives at the Arsenale Maria Regia di Palermo with the original exhibition 'Plastic – Recycling, shapes and colours'. A cultural project created from below with middle school students with the ambition of spreading more education on environmental issues.Forty small sculptures in recycled plastic, collective effort born dto the family stimulus of the Sicilian artist's daughter. Because even artists are sensitive to "inside voices", as Eduardo De Filippo said.
Until next November 2 in the Palermo structure you can see them jobs generated by the recovery of bottles, caps, bottles , collected in 24 monththe. In the Badalamenti house they had seen a documentary on the invasion of plastic into everyday life. From that documentary the spring that touched Vittor was triggered. She set to work to make the kids discover that things that "are thrown away can take on a new shape and a new life". She succeeded.
The exhibition space, explains the artist, must launch emotions, the sensation of being in the middle of the sea. A stratified sea, created day after day by the voracity of consumption and the indifference of people. But something is changing and the boys from Palermo with the enthusiasm of their age guided by the artist are witnesses of this change. Everything it and is exposed is the result of a pinch (made with three fingers) of conscience educational , not exhausted. Palermo and Sicily are fighting the battle for separate waste collection and environmental protection. The context in which the project developed is stimulating. The local institutions that have the power to make and unmake have to learn from these projects. Grassroots art has great educational value. Experimentation in classrooms, led by artists linked to their land, increases young people's awareness of defending and protecting the habitat. To fight to state just reasons.
It's right to include among the effects of contamination Art all le expressions that have as their theme the environment and the protection of landscape.Young people need the languages and representations of art. Here in Palermo, at the same time as the exhibition, a creative workshop is also being worked on for new sculptures to be donated to schools. New symbols will be produced to facilitate understanding of the problems.
Environmental themes capture the interest of Italian and foreign artists in a whirling crescendo. Dozens of exhibitions and publications that elevate sensibilities. Attention must be paid to young people to give them the opportunity to do what previous generations have not been able to do adequately. The languages of art help them. Many of them live in degraded neighborhoods, afflicted by poor urban maintenance, by existential hardships where art in its multiple expressions, unfortunately, is denied. Denied in an everyday life which, instead, it can be overturned thanks to projects like this one conceived by Maria Badalamenti.
