The second life of rubbish

In a village called Tara near Mumbai, kids are busy making the earth sink. They are collecting abandoned chocolate wrappers and chips packets and stuffing them inside a hollow, circular bamboo structure that has been masquerading as the globe in their neighbourhood lately. Finally, when this wooden globe, whose axis lies on a haathgadi, tilts under pressure, their job will be complete and so will one of their lessons in land art.
Land Art, which is also known as eco art in some countries, is a form that involves using materials found in Nature, taking the provenance of art out of the gallery and into the outside world.
Over ten days ago, three Indians artists (Shilpa Joglekar, Raman Adone and Prashant Jogdand), along with four foreign sculptors (Canada's Ryszard Litwinuik, Cameroon's Patrick Nerus, France's Myriam du Manoir and Korea's Bongi Park) and a little help from these rural kids, began turning various abandoned objects like milk bottles into raw material for educative art.
The resulting seven installations of this 'land art project', including a dome made of milk bottles and a stub of corn that smells of gutkha, will now be projected at the Horniman Circle and Kala Ghoda alongside local "found objects" like the barren tree standing outside the Max Mueller Bhavan which will beg for leaves.
This initiative called 'Non Violence II' (the first being Gandhi's landmark movement) was conceived by Yusuf Mehrally Centre's Haresh Shah as "a permanent multi-medium platform for using various art forms to promote a movement of reconciliation with Nature".
As a part of this project, artist Patrick Nereus has made a leaf-shaped structure from plastic bottles sewn together with abandoned wires, out of which a tree will ultimately grow. Nereus, however, says that people who deal with land art, which is widely practised in the US and the UK, run the risk of being mistaken for "madmen". "But when they see us recycling and recreating the garbage, they are curious to know more," says Nereus, who has been answering questions from his adivasi helpers with the only Hindi word he knows-"paanwalla".
These adivasi children volunteer to help from 9 am to 7 pm every day. "Not only do they learn about Nature but also about alien subjects like email, internet and computers, which exist in a city a mere two hours away," says Shilpa Joglekar, curator of the project and creator of the wooden globe that denotes how we are contributing to the slow sinking of the world.
Canada's Ryszard Litwinuik is using raw materials, including spare mechanical parts and the trunk of a felled tree. While Litwinuik is hoping to explore the possibilities of rekindling respect through the reuse of "things we take for granted" Nereus sums up the overall message: "It's only when people live like birds, without destroying Nature, will our purpose be achieved." Till then, the earth will continue to tilt.
(Non Violence II will be on display from February 5 to 13 at Horniman Circle and Kala Ghoda)