This month, “The invisible becomes visible” opens at the Sewer Museum in Brussels, and will remain open to the public until June 19, 2021. This exhibition is a warning about the microplastic pollution invading our ocean, and exactly fulfills the mission undertaken Surfrider Europe’s Art Campus: use art to raise awareness about environmental protection.
“The invisible becomes visible”: the Art Campus exhibition at the Brussels Sewer Museu
The exhibition, initiated by Art Campus, brings together photos taken by three photographers-scientists, Richard Kirby, Jean Noviel and Thomais Vlachogianni, and the productions of the LEESU (Water, Environment and Urban Systems Laboratory), and is an invitation to change scale. By making microscopic marine life visible, the exhibition also underlines the impact of our daily consumption on the smallest living organism: plankton. These photographs highlight a hitherto invisible form of pollution, the microplastics and textile fibers which float in our ocean and have a strong impact on ecosystems.
Since the exhibition aims to raise awareness among as many spectators as possible, access is free, by reservation, at the Brussels Sewer Museum from March 13 to June 19, 2021. From May, the photographs will also be exhibited at the Water Pavilion in Paris, where they will remain for a year.
An artistic and educational exhibition responding to the mission of Art Campus
By offering visitors a new perspective and an emotive approach to their relationship to the environment, Art Campus continues, with this exhibition, to place art as a medium and a means of changing behavior. Since the program began in 2012, the link between art and the environment has never been stronger; awareness, never so amusing.
Art Campus gives rise to real places of learning where knowledge about the environment is exchanged – through exhibitions and discussions – and enriched within co-produced artistic projects. Each exhibition is accompanied by workshops accessible to all types of audiences. This year, “The Invisible Becomes Visible” should, if sanitary conditions permit, be supplemented by a writing workshop encouraging children to write odes to the Ocean. These texts, which will be produced in each city where the exhibition is mounted, could then be grouped together and exhibited: a real means of broadening ecological awareness and bringing together, around art, the entire European Surfrider community.
Europeanization, a new desire for Surfrider Art Campus
By forcing it to look for alternatives, the health crisis has in fact enabled Art Campus to rethink itself and to move towards a new way forward: Europeanization.
While lockdown largely restricted public access to “The invisible becomes visible” at the Maison du Surf in Biarritz and on Surfrider Europe’s premises, this is the first time that the programme has exported one of its exhibitions beyond French borders. It is a way of overcoming national restrictions, and also of raising awareness among all European citizens about the need to protect the ocean, by bringing art directly before their eyes
