Project Ionian Arts School 2017
A group of volunteers from Kefalonia took to the open sea between Kefalonia and Ithaca to gather up the plastic debris floating there, which ends up polluting the beaches of the Ionian Islands.
As there is no infrastructure for recycling this plastic rubbish on the islands, Micheline Divaris-Lambert had the idea of raising the awareness of both tourists and locals, about the dangers of turning the sea into a floating refuse dump, by using the debris as raw material for creating works of art.
The recovered buoys, bottles, life-jackets and other plastic objects will all disappear under thousands of pieces of mosaic, and each artist will be able to express his own commitment to environmental issues, according to his own sensibility.
The participants in this epic Project Ionian Arts in June 2017 will begin their journey with one day of immersing themselves in the limpid waters of the Ionian Sea around Kefalonia, Ithaca, Arkoudi and Kastos.
This is an Odyssey of the 21st Century, shorter than that of Odysseus who needed ten years to return to Ithaca, which we hope will have an impact on the environmental and artistic causes we support.
We will return to Kefalonia, enriched by our experiences, and facing the sea, we will get down to work, as the artist is not only a dreamer, the artist is also a tireless worker, an informed technician, a creator.
The first week of the workshop will be dedicated to personal creative research, investigating the materials to be used, stone, clay, glass, sea pebbles, shells.
A piece of work will be completed on a wooden support with dimensions 40x30cm, and each participant will be able to take this home.
In the second week, we will concentrate on the creation of mosaics using supports made of the plastic debris collected, which will have been sorted during the winter by the Kefalonian volunteer ecologists. Each artist will have his own recycled support provided, and the collection of these individual works will create a unique work of art donated to the residents of the area, to be exhibited in the garden of Nikos’ restaurant, who has generously provided a suitable working space for us which is conducive to creating art and will be open to all visitors.