400 Posters,
Collaboration with Gabrielle de Vietri
Climarte Poster project 2016
2016
CLIMARTE commissioned eleven Australian artists to design posters that engage the community on climate change action, and convey the strength, optimism, and urgency we need to move to a clean, renewable energy future. During May 2016 hundreds of AO size posters will be printed and displayed on poster sites around Melbourne.
Hazelwood is Australia’s most pressing issue with regards to climate change. At Melbourne’s doorstep the most polluting power station in Australia – and the third most polluting in the world. Hazelwood contributes to 3% of Australia’s carbon emissions. In 2014 the open cut mine set fire, causing one of the worst environmental and public health disasters in Australian history. The plant and the methods it uses are archaic and dangerous, but surprisingly, not many people know about its existence. Maybe Hazelwood needs a face.
In order to have a credible climate change policy, Australia must replace coal-fired power stations, starting with Hazelwood, with clean, safe renewable energy.
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The caustically funny poster seems straightforward but is equally slippery. For most of us, electricity is an abstraction, produced “invisibly” using coal that is burnt out of sight and therefore out of mind. Making the connections and cutting emissions, in an everyday sense, become that much harder to do. So the artists Gabrielle de Vietri & Will Foster put a name and a face to the problem. By personalising Victoria’s Hazelwood power station – the worst polluting generator in the developed world – they also personalise the moral choices of politicians and others keeping this lethal antique going. Abstract no longer. Peter Christoff
The poster is political: how artists are challenging climate change by Peter Christoff:
theconversation.com/the-poster-is-political-how-artists-are-challenging-climate-change-58740