Isabelle Hermann
No. 110 – spring-summer 2015

Nicolás Uriburu: Greenpeace to the Rescue!


The collaboration between Nicolás Uriburu, an Argentinian artist who has played a role the ecological art field since 1960, and Greenpeace, a non governmental organization founded in 1971, stands out as an exception. Indeed, the NGO has not been very eager to get involved in the artistic sphere, it apparently even refused a proposal by Joseph Beuys’ in the early 1980s. However, a decade later, it did respond to Uriburu’s call, and established a partnership that has proven to be exceptional to this day.

Between 1998 and 2010, the artist and the Greenpeace activists collaborated on four occasions in public space in view of providing a platform to denounce environmental scandals. These joint actions were implemented by the artist who felt that he was not receiving sufficient support from cultural and official institutions. Thus, feeling the weariness and isolation of a “Superman who throws on his cape as soon as an ecological problem arises,” it was Uriburu who called Greenpeace to the rescue.1

In 1998, the artist and the activists jointly opposed the installation of a trans-Andean gas pipeline, the route of which would have cut the natural habitat of the Yaguaretés—an endangered jaguar species—in half. Uriburu and Greenpeace ignored the non-authorization by the director of the Buenos Aires National Museum of Fine Arts, where Uriburu was exhibiting, by covertly climbing—a “typical Green peace method” states the Argentinian—the museum’s neoclassical wall to unfurl a very large-scale drape (10 x 15m) created by the artist. The panel


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