Last week Finnish artist Kaisa Salmi outfitted the Finnish Parliament staircase with about 60.000 gerbera flowers in an attempt to show that this very same place could be the natural habitat of these tropical plants if the climate change continues in the direction of global warming.

The artist explains that seen from a distance her environmental piece of art also reveals a double rainbow. Possibly, although I tried approaching the work from various distances and no such thing as a rainbow revealed to me.

It is not only a great idea, but also a strong political statement. Especially since climate change has been a hot topic in Finnish media and politics for more than a year now. Reversing the current trend of global warming should also be one of politicians and citizens top priorities.

Already upon setting up the work Kaisa Salmi announced that people can come and collect the flowers once the exhibition was over. Even though the announced collection time and date were Saturday, June 9th at 9 o’clock in the morning, first flower snatchers appeared already during the night as they were returning home from clubs. Anyway, there was still enough flowers as more than thousand people came to collect them on Saturday. They emptied the monumental staircase in just a couple of hours. The work was on display for exactly a week.

It was nice to see flowers instead of manure, eggs or rotten tomatoes in front of a parliament.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 9:41 pm and is filed under Art, Culture, Environment, Finland, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.