Artwork: PlasticWaste Labyrinth by Luzinterruptus, Madrid, 2017
Luzinterruptus is an anonymous artistic group based in Spain creating urban interventions in public spaces. They began creating work in the streets of Madrid in 2008 with the single purpose of using the medium of light to focus people’s attention on problems they found in the city that appeared to go unnoticed by citizens and authorities. The aim of the team is to leave lights on in the city so that other people can put them out.
The poetry of their work stems from this illumination: “We use light as a raw material and the dark as our canvas… light allows us to make interventions in a smaller degree and greater in others.”
One of their larger scale interventions has been the Plastic Waste Labyrinth in Madrid’s Plaza Mayor for its 4th Centennial Celebration (2017), constructed around the statue of King Philip III. They did a smaller iteration in Poland in 2014 and more recently in Buenos Aires (2018). Built using a month’s worth of plastic bottles that had been consumed in the plaza, the work graphically emphasised the amount of waste generated throughout the city every day, and that’s often not recycled appropriately.
Artwork: PlasticWaste Labyrinth by Luzinterruptus, Madrid, 2017
The walls of the maze measured 3 metres in height and comprised 15,000 bottles hung within transparent bags. Additional bottles were gathered from hospitals, universities and official institutions to make up the required amount to make the labyrinth. However they weren’t able to source bottles from the city’s recycling services, as they didn’t separate PET plastic waste from collections, which only highlighted the need for such an intervention.
While visually mesmerising—especially at night—the piece was not meant to be easy to experience. Luzinterruptus wanted people to feel discomfort when entering it, to experience the sense of being lost and hemmed in by plastic waste. This claustrophobia and sensory overload gave direct experience of the weight of the problem of plastic pollution—not just engaging with it as an abstract idea. Walking the labyrinth meant being immersed in the actual pollution so that it could no longer be ignored.
(source: www.luzinterruptus.com)