“I went to Sicily, in the winter, for a month. I walked on the beach for a long time. And with every walk I found plastic, waste, wrecks. In winter the sea returns everything that men throw in in the summer. The beach was, in some places, attacked by plastic. And then I got an idea. Draw on that plasticon that dead plastic, on those corpses of objects abandoned on the beach by storm surges. Bringing that waste back to life, turning them into fish, sea creatures. And at the same time, with this small gesture, try to send out a message of awareness ”.
Matteo lifeguard careful to understand the dangers
Matteo Cavaciocchi (@cavart_mc on Instagram) for 15 years he has been working as lifeguard in a swimming pool in Florence. One of those where families with children go, or middle-aged people looking for a little escape from the deadly heat this summer. Or foreigners, who invent a little vacation, even if instead of sand there are gravel and grass. He is there, by the pool, and even if he talks to you he never stops looking at the surface of the water all the time. “The dangers must be understood first, you need to understand a few seconds before what can happen: if you wait for it to happen, it is already too late“. And so, Matteo is a kind of human camera: he notices someone who, twenty meters away, is in the water with glasses and warns him that he can’t: he sees two girls holding a friend with their head down. water for too long, he notices a lady with an uncertain step on the opposite side of the pool, who is about to go into the water, and goes to help her. He has been doing this job for years, now he is attentive to every slightest ripple of normality.
Matteo the artist on a mission to save the environment
But his real life is in the drawings, in the shapes he dreams of and puts on paper, canvas, plastic. “Ilove the sea, to death. And I am shocked by the amount of waste that has gone into the sea. I can’t get the images ofPlastic island: that huge pile of garbage that is in thePacific Ocean and which has an area as large as that of Spain. Four million tons of plastic waste, which disintegrate into tiny fragments, which end up in the stomach of the fishup on in food chain up to man: they also found traces of plastic in our blood“.
“I told myself that I could do something, a small thing, to raise awareness about this problem. And when, in the midst of the waste thrown from the sea, I found a piece of plastic that inspired me, I began to work on it. I painted it, and that piece of plastic became again a grouper, a dolphin, a jellyfish, a shark. Now those pieces of plastic are, somehow, big revenue“. And they will be visible, from September, in Sesto Fiorentinoat “Palimpsest” cultural center. Where Matteo will start a drawing workshop in the autumn that foresees a continuation of that project: “With the guys from the workshop we will go out into the street and paint on plastics and waste that we will find on the street”.