Awareness campaigns are usually effective, when they adopt methods that are logic-defying.
How about getting a 25-feet-long killer whale to give a performance at a beach one day, and at a mall, the next?
What if this killer whale has been crafted with specifications that include 35,000 plastic-bottle caps?
If a whale made of bottle caps can’t start a conservation, what can?
So, it’s no surprise that B. Gowtham, creator of this installation, has found more-than-expected-success, with this social-art project, which is about starting a sustainability conversation around missing plastic-bottle caps; about how it usually gets submerged under weightier waste-management issues.
“A plastic bottle cap that is left behind can keep a potentially mighty tree submerged in the soil, by simply preventing the seed from growing,” says Gowtham, an artist and a sustainability campaigner. In Chennai, he spearheads a WalkForPlastic initiative, which we featured in these pages sometime ago, and which incidentally is set to have its 100th walk on September 15.
“The killer whale art project began in curiosity. It was curiosity about what happens to the lost plastic bottle-caps. Nobody gives it any thought — neither users of these bottles, nor those who collect these bottles as part of clean-ups. We forget that caps are also plastic, and that they can be recycled too,” says Gowtham.
Though the “killer whale” has been swimming around in his head for some time, the project began on March 19 this year.
“It was my birthday, and I put out a post on Facebook, saying if anyone wants to gift me anything on this day, let it be discarded plastic-bottle caps. The post alone gave me 10,000 caps. I started looking for more in all kinds of places, including old marts,” says Gowtham.
Gowthan managed to complete the project with the support of “three people who worked continuously on it, and 16 others who volunteered.” He points out that the killer whale carries around 35,000 bottle caps, on a body made of steel and wrapped in plastic sheet. The caps are glued to the plastic sheets.
Gowtham has displayed the killer whale at five places so far – Elliot’s beach, N4, Madras Boat Club, Phoenix Club Crest; and Akkarai beach, where it was displayed last weekend.
“Transporting the killer whale to a venue is a challenge. It is 25 feet long, 4.7 feet wide, and 5.2 feet high. In transit, some caps fall down, and they can’t be re-glued to the plastic sheet. For such situations, I have a stock of spare plastic-bottle caps, numbering 60,000. Of course, most of these caps for future social-art projects,” says Gowtham, pointing out that in June 2018, he had created a fish bone, with 8,000 to 10,000 discarded straws.
He adds, “This effort came much before the plastic ban came into effect.”
