Week 2: Evian Flu

[Jan 28-Feb 4]

Week 2 of the plastic street art project came together quite well, right after a victorious, most lucky day making staff as Frontliner with Greenpeace.

I was on a rush b/c work finished late.

I invited friends to join--to make the piece bigger--

but knowing my friends were coming from work at the office, then heading off to some dinner on a Friday night, the likelihood of them bringing plastic products was slim to none.

Luckily at the Greenpeace office, there was a bag of accumulated plastic waiting to be recycled.

I grabbed those, placed them in a Trader Joe's bag and walked around like I had groceries.

(Can never be too cool in NYC. :))

I had connected over FB with Jose Antonio Alcayaga III about collaborating with this piece and his concern was also mine--

"Will we have enough plastic?"

Of course there are plastic bags and plastic garbage everywhere, but I'm not prepared to dig them up from the trash.

So as a backup plan, I mentioned that we will make a bird skeleton, if we don't have enough plastic.

I looked up images of a bird skeleton as a preparation.

When I arrived at the planned site, I walked around just to survey the scene. There were two police officers leaning on a column on one end. And to avoid trouble I placed the plastic material behind the columns.

At 7:15, I was still alone. No phone calls from friends who planned to be there and I thought everyone was a no show. bummer. So I started setting up, arranging the plastic in various sizes.

Then Jose, says "hello."

This was the first time we met. Smiles all around.

We chatted about the groups that we lead and exchanged pointers.

At 7:30 right before we started the work, Saulius shows up, dressed to go to some important meeting. He had been there since 7:00 but couldn't find us, and he had somewhere to go by 8pm.

So I introduced the two collaborators and we immediately began.

The work process went rather quickly. Big props to Jose who's energy and artistic background really moved the project forward.

We took photos. Jose took a 30 second video, capturing an angry woman in the first few seconds.

Then we titled the piece, Jose's brilliant suggestion of Evian, a play on Avian. The full title became Evian Flu--born and raised in Plastic Island.

Many people stopped to take photos. One guy mentioned, the piece looked like Teradactyl, which is related evolutionarily to birds. He also said that most likely petroleum is made out of dinosaurs skeletons which is what the plastic is made out of. What an interesting thing to think about!

We left for dinner, came back 2 hours later to dismantle the piece--but it was gone.

So wondering what happened???!!!???