French artist Florence Vial has created an art piece to highlight importance of recycling in UAE, and that too from empty Nespresso containers.
It is all started when Florence Vial arrived in Dubai and noticed that the campaigns and motivation for recycling are not at satisfactory level. She decided to do an artwork highlighting the importance of recycling.
After deciding on the material, Vial went to the Nespresso shop in Dubai and asked if she could collect the empty capsules. Nespresso, the popular at-home espresso machine brand, has been taking back used pods for recycling for a year now at its Abu Dhabi and Dubai stores. She visited regularly and took the bags of material back to her studio where she cleaned the pods inside and out.
Then she came up with the design for the abaya – black on the outside but inside, many different colours would be seen in waves. Each one is stuck on a foam base with sticks.
“I was very much inspired by the women of the UAE,” she says. “They wear the black abayas but underneath they are very colourful. Also as a European, it was important to talk about the fact that women are always women, no matter what culture they come from. The movement, grace and poise of a woman walking in an abaya is something beautiful and I wanted to capture that in the material of the Nespresso pods, which I think is also really classy.”
Al Ness Abaya was completed in 2011 and acquired the following year by Etihad Modern Art Gallery in Abu Dhabi.
When the gallery opened in 2013, a large part of its philosophy was of recycling and using found materials – making Al Ness Abaya an ideal acquisition.
“I am really happy that it is still making an impact,” says Vial. “For me it was a really different pdidn’t so I didn’t know how people would respond. I am quite proud that it is a project that is still interesting to the audience.”
via The National.
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