Africa has had a devastating history of blood diamond wars. Blood diamond refers to a diamond mined in a war zone and then sold to finance an invading army's war efforts, usually in Africa where more than two-thirds of the worlds diamonds are extracted.
This site specific social / political word play was painted on the exterior wall of Johannesburg's largest diamond trader Jewel City.
Japan has begun discharging nuclear wastewater into the ocean four times a year, each time lasting 17 consecutive days. Under their 30-year plan, it is estimated that approximately 1.34 million tons of wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant will be released into what was once a clean and fertile sea. Countless marine species are forced to leave their natural habitats. About 7.6 billion people in the world face life threats.
“What Is Missing?” is a multi-sited memorial created by Maya Lin to raise awareness through science-based artworks about the present sixth mass extinction of species, connect this loss of species to habitat degradation and loss, and emphasize that by protecting and restoring habitat, we can both reduce carbon emissions and protect species.
"Around 30 people gathered on Victoria Island Monday morning to advocate for the return of the endangered American Eel to the Ottawa River.
The event mixed art with activism, with attendees carrying windsocks decorated to look like as eels as they marched to Parliament Hill.
The marquee creation was an 8.2-meter-long replica of an eel, which had to be carried by six walkers."
Josh Keyes is a contemporary artist who takes a "satirical look at the impact urban sprawl has on the environment and surmises, with the aid of scientific slices and core samples, what could happen if we continue to infiltrate and encroach on our rural surroundings."
In an endeavor to raise awareness at the local and international level, Razia organized the Mifohaza Masoala (Wake Up Masoala) music and environmental festival, which took place at the edge of the Masoala Rainforest in October 2011. The concert featured some of Madagascar’s most thrilling performers, and the festival was a tremendous success, with over 10,000 people in attendance.
Jay-Z rapped alongside side Bono, the Edge and Rihanna; Coldplay's Chris Martin moonlighted as Beyoncé's piano player; Justin Timberlake covered Leonard Cohen — and those performances, from January 22nd's multinetwork, $66 million-grossing telethon for Haitian earthquake victims, were just the most visible of musicians' efforts to raise funds.
A grey minivan rattled through São Paulo’s hilly suburbs, loaded with spray cans, paint rollers, buckets and a ladder as five street artists drove to the Atibainha river, rap lyrics blaring from their speakers.
On the sweltering afternoon of 26 February, they painted colourful protest murals on the legs of a bridge that crosses one of São Paulo’s most important water sources, nestled in the Serra da Cantareira mountain range.
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is home to the Oglala Lakota, designated as part of the Great Sioux Reservation. This land and its people have endured many tragedies at the hands of the United States government. Over 500 treaties negotiated in good faith with the U.S. government have been broken, changed or nullified to suit expansionist interests. Despite centuries of oppression, the Lakota people remain resilient, faithful, and strong.
IT’S 7 AM, and a thin layer of mist still hovers over the harbor in Talamone as fisherman Paolo Fanciulli stretches out his nets. Pulling them out of a plastic tub, he examines them section by section, setting the ripped ones aside to be repaired. It’s a time-consuming process—one that’s occupied men from this tiny village on the coast of Tuscany for centuries.
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Activists with a big fake polar bear have occupied a Shell service station in the Swiss resort of Davos to protest Royal Dutch Shell PLC's oil drilling in the Arctic.
About 25 activists from around Europe chained gas pumps together Friday at the station near where the World Economic Forum was being held and hung a banner on the roof reading "Arctic Oil - Too Risky."
Organized in large part by Project Laundry List, in 2007 a four-hundred foot clothesline was strung in front of Hydro-Quebec headquarters to protest their destruction of the Rupert River and the traditional hunting grounds of the Cree and Innu so that people in the US and along the border can dry their clothes in a tumble dryer. Project Laundry List promotes clotheslines as a simple way for America to save 10% on its residential energy bill!
In Jan. 2016 Karl Mattson from Rolla, BC displayed some of his unique sculptures for exhibition at Lantern Gallery in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His 'Life Pods' are sculptures constructed using only found objects.Tools, metal fragments, debris, and fuel tanks are some of the components welded together forming both the solo pod, and the family size pod. The larger pieces were acquired near the pipeline embedding site near to his farm.
The Bread and Puppet Theater was founded in 1963 by Peter Schumann on New York City’s Lower East Side. Besides rod-puppet and hand puppet shows for children, the concerns of the first productions were rents, rats, police, and other problems of the neighborhood. More complex theater pieces followed, in which sculpture, music, dance and language were equal partners. The puppets grew bigger and bigger.
Cheat Neutral satirizes the carbon offset model by offering people the opportunity to pay someone else not to cheat on their partner in order to neutralize their own infidelity. Cheatneutral allows you to pay £2.50 to carry on cheating while funding “monogamy-boosting offset projects”.
In 2008, my work as an artist took me to a gigantic landfill outside Rio de Janeiro called Jardim Gramacho. After operating for more than 30 years, the sanitary facility, once one of the largest in the world, had reached its maximum capacity and was on the eve of closing permanently.
The large crowds and brightly coloured placards of the school climate strikes became some of the defining images of 2019.
“There would be lots of chanting and the energy was always amazing,” says Dominique Palmer, a 20-year-old climate activist from London who has been involved with the strikes for more than a year. “Being there with everyone in that moment is truly an electrifying feeling. It’s very different now.”
“Teilchenbeschleuniger” ist ein investigatives Kunstprojekt des Künstlerduos 431art, welches Atomenergie kritisch reflektiert. Der “Teilchenbeschleuniger” verteilt Teilchen namens “Jülicher Törtchen”, “Brokdorfer Mürbchen” oder “Muffins Fukushima” an die Bevölkerung.
Lewis Pugh typically starts to plan his next extreme-swimming challenge after just enough time has passed for him to have forgotten how deeply unpleasant the last one was. He opens his atlas – I know! An atlas! – and turns the pages until he finds a body of water that captures his imagination.
The "Democracy Wall" in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, New York was established in 2009. This wall is a long-term, community art activist project that is part wall mural, part past information archive.
The beacon flashed incessantly. On. Off. On again.
Like some sort of traffic light gone crazy, it pierced the thick nighttime mist hovering over San Francisco Bay. The light sent a message five miles across the dark waters from Ghirardelli Square to Alcatraz Island. There, cheers erupted as the light flashed the words, "Go Indians!"