Geopuzzle final event took place correspondingly with the 1° Provincial Conference on "Energy Conservation and Alternative Sources"
held by the Province Department of Environment on January 13, 2006.
This art project, born from the work done in a workshop by Massimo Cartaginese and Silvia Paoletti with some secondary school children,
was aimed at creating a map of Esino River, through which the artists wanted to make visible the perceptive/psychological impairment caused
by pollutants from industrial plastics.
To do this they proposed the students to reinvent the planimetry which tracks the course of the river in the stretch of the Oasis Ripa Bianca
during group laboratory activities. A seven meters long planimetry was divided into twenty sections. The individual sections have been mixed
together and the boys, in turn, after having extracted one at a time, have put them in succession on the
ground, and marked them with the findings, waste, polluting materials. Slowly they formed the outline of a river twisted and strewn with debris,
a river semantically equals itself but unrecognizable.
Interestingly, the playful and creative operation was well transposed by the students because one of the most important problems of modern world,
the pollution, it was effectively presented. It has been an operation able from the beginning to set itself in terms of an event, a testing laboratory
encouraging the creativity of each student on a theme so hot and current, in a deliberately disrespectful way of the rules and practices through which
it is instead used to intervene.
Geopuzzle in fact wanted to mix artistic content, ecological, political and social relations with the desire to offer a real own puzzle.
An invitation to think on geography no longer as an obsolete and notional subject but as an absolute expression of the growing problems posed by
invasive relationship between the work of human beings and environmental resources.
The altered image of the river resulting from the workshop, which revealed the current dangerous loss of naturalness was then provocatively printed
on PVC garbage bags therefore occurred in a redefined role for art, fully functional at a broader level, a mobile message which could impose a
different point of view and to invite serious reflection.
In Sassoferrato the bags were in fact distributed to those who spoke at the conference and to a sample of the urban population with intent to cause an
immediate response in the audience. It was also required filling out a questionnaire designed by the artists, aimed at raising awareness these issues,
even to an audience of non-experts, as a stimulus to further reflection on sustainable development, as well as attention on the relationship that art can
and must play with the increasingly urgent environment problems.
As always on these occasions the actualization of this specific proposal, the actual response and the actual assimilation of the people met were, nothing
but complicated things, yet deeply stimulating.
The output of the artists -planned for distribution of these art materials-has raised naturally, suspicion and amazement in the inhabitants of a small town
such as Sassofferato, causing embarrassment and reluctance of the most diverse.
Yet some, beyond the first traumatic impact with people you've never seen and who ask your attention and spare time, agreed to cooperate, showing
interest in the proposal and in the creative activity of provocation.
The action of Sassoferrato was partially closing a proposal that will continue through the shipment by the Province Department of Environment, of the
garbage bags and of the questionnaires to all residents of the area of the river Esino.
This project, was essentially conceived as an effective interdisciplinary action, as an adventure of discovery, an attempt to finally reach a widespread
ecological awareness.
the presentation of the garbage bag and of the questionnaire. Interviews in Sassoferrato streets.