Walking from the cobblestone road into Jaffa’s local Sharabiya house, the beautiful walls and floors are littered in trash – specifically millions of pieces of microplastic beautifully shapeshifted into coral reefs, sea creatures, photography, and more. Collected by Evelyn Anca, co-founder of Plastic Free Israel and sustainable artist of the 16 plastic pieces, the room is filled for a 3-day exhibit titled Love, Death, and Plastic.
The exhibit was a collaboration between Evi Art and Up to Us, an organization of experts that develops urban sustainability through cultural events, entrepreneurship, and sustainable development in business. “There’s no education in this country,” Anca says of her inspiration for the exhibition. “Art is a tool to express my feelings about the mess that we’re making here. The more aware I become of the harm humans have on the environment, the more I’m filled with frustration – and putting it into art is my way to communicate about it. Hopefully, it will raise awareness and we can start shifting the culture around how we treat our environment.”
Anca’s work, which featured a dolphin, turtle, sea horse, jellyfish, and numerous standing “coral reefs,” is made up of 100% recycled materials. The larger pieces are designed from bottle caps, water bottles, pipes, plastic bags, wires, and dozens of other kinds of miscellaneous items found mostly along the beaches in Israel.
One of her latest pieces, a ‘Yellow-Legged Gull’ made with over 120 lighters, was inspired by a study from Midway Island, “a remote and uninhabited island in the North Pacific Ocean known for the high mortality of albatrosses as a result of plastic pollution on the island. Almost every albatross body is found with a plastic lighter in it…the yellow-legged gull is our local species since Israel too suffers from highly polluted beaches, streets, parks with products related directly to the smoking industry.”
A number of pieces were made completely from cigarette butts, including a jacket made of 4,000 hand-sewn butts, a Nemo fish made of over 2,100 butts, and a baby doll in a butt-dress. Over 4.5 trillion butts are littered each year and are the single most littered item around the world.
A central table also housed over 20 items with their production dates beside them, collected mostly from Midron Jaffa Park, some of which dated over 50 years ago. The description reads of the waste as “proof of how long the plastic can remain in the environment” and invites visitors to “try to imagine how many years the plastic we use today will remain behind us in its original form.
The event highlights the massive impact that microplastics are having on harming the environment. When asked why the name Love, Death, and Plastic, Anca said “There is so much love that I feel for the natural world, and that WE should feel. This world is what gives us life, yet we are causing so much death, because of plastic, and so many of us don’t see it. Pure and simple, we can do better and we’re not doing it. This is on us. And we need to do better.”
