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Selfridges Eye:

June 2019

With Extinction Rebellion taking over London, the Venice Biennale dominated by art that’s confronting sustainability, and schoolchildren cutting classes to protest about climate issues, it feels as if the conversation around the future of our planet has taken on a new urgency. And culture – be that art installations or magazines – is deeply embedded in the conversation too. Here we celebrate the top five places we see this happening. 

Sun & Sea (Marina) at the Lithuanian Pavilion

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Our highlights from Venice Biennale 2019 (on until 24 November 2019)…

Sun & Sea (Marina), Lithuanian Pavilion – by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė

While in the past art addressing climate change has felt paralysingly scary, the Lithuanian pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale is an exception. Sun & Sea (Marina) is a chilling work about climate change that is also a delightful opera recounting a day at the beach. From a mezzanine gallery you can gaze down on a beach scene complete with swimsuit-clad sunbathers and children playing bat and ball in the sand (35 tons of the stuff, to be exact), who each sing about the woes of the world. Topics range from the everyday, such as nobody cleaning up their rubbish, to more pressing issues, like fears of environmental catastrophe. We stayed for well over 40 minutes, enrapt by this unique, gentle and subtle portrayal of human resignation, self-absorption and laziness. Oh, and it also won the biennale’s top prize: the Golden Lion of the Biennale Arte 2019. 

The opera performance takes place at the Lithuanian Pavilion every Saturday (until 31 October), from 10am-6pm. Note: be prepared to queue.

Red Regatta, by Melissa McGill

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Red Regatta, by Melissa McGill

Every trip to Venice is a bit bittersweet. On the one hand, you’re visiting one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, a place where every inlay, cornice, relief and spire is steeped in history. On the other, the city is sinking and you’re part of the problem. Artist Melissa McGill’s Red Regatta project aims to remind Biennale visitors of the damage they’re doing and the threat to Venice from rising sea levels by having a regatta of 50 traditional sailboats with red sails on the waterfront from now until September. We were lucky enough to see this without even planning to – it was breathtakingly beautiful and a reminder that we need to do more to preserve one of the world’s greatest cities.

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Other Venice Biennale must-sees…

  • 1.     The main Biennale exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff from London’s Hayward Gallery, explores ‘how art can be a kind of guide for how to live and think in today’s precarious world’. Our top climate change-focused picks: Christine and Margaret Wertheim's faux-coral reefs crafted from materials including plastic bags, yarn and biscuit tins, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Joi Bittle’s Cosmorana (the Mars diorama), resembling Mars’ landscape – our future home, perhaps, given the very real threat of climate change.

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    2.     Ghana’s debut pavilion – designed by Architect David Adjaye, with works by six artists including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s mesmerising paintings, and Ghana-born El Anatsui’s glimmering sculptures made from reused bottle tops, with thought-provoking titles like ‘Earth Shedding its Skin’. 

  • 3.     New Zealand Pavilion – Artist Dane Mitchell’s melancholic sculpture prints a never-ending list of extinct species and obsolete objects, which can also be heard via his fake pine trees installed across Venice that nod to our loss of nature.

  • 4.     French Pavilion – Turner Prize winner Laure Provost’s piece Deep See Blue Surrounding You which immerses you in a carnivalesque oceanic extravaganza. What stuck with us, weirdly, is the artist’s plans to dig a tunnel through the British Pavilion…

The Fashion for Good museum, Amsterdam

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Fashion for Good, Amsterdam

It’s been getting a lot of Instagram airtime recently – and for good reason: Fashion for Good in central Amsterdam is the world’s first museum dedicated to sustainable fashion innovation and a blueprint for future museums. The beautiful space (kitted out using recycled materials wherever possible) uses a host of new technologies to encourage us to examine our buying behaviour. There’s no escaping the hard-hitting facts, but the focus feels more empowering and celebratory: there are special RFID wristbands (or ‘action bracelets’, made from recycled plastic) to interact with the museum’s action stations and create your own Digital Action Plan, and eco-friendly T-shirts that you can design and print, on the spot. There are also plenty of selfie opportunities along the way – including a kaleidoscopic selfie which forms part of an installation alongside other visitors’ selfies (#smile). This is a next-generation museum at its best.   

Manifesto magazine

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Manifesto Magazine

The Earth Issue Magazine, Issue 3 ‘Manifesto’

An artist that uses mould as part of their practice, a chef using food to build a creative and sustainable community, a sculptor who uses basket weaving techniques to explore nature – these are just three of the inspiring creatives whose practice is explored in ‘Manifesto’, the most recent instalment of The Earth Issue. One of the few magazines to really tackle sustainability in an empowering way, their focus on how creatives interact with and learn from the environment has been hugely inspirational for us as we consider our own sustainable future.