GoGreen Week made a powerful comeback to NYU Shanghai this spring with a flurry of events on the environment, wildlife, energy, food and sustainable development organized at length by student club Green Shanghai. The annual tradition, in its third year, will culminate on Saturday with an Earth Day Conference and an eco-market that has already titillated many environmental enthusiasts.
Trash Fashion
Kickstarting the week-long celebration was the trash fashion show on April 16, where some 20 students transformed upcycled garbage materials into 13 self-designed fashion statements presented via catwalk at the Envision Pavilion outside of the Himalayas Museum. Collaborating with Shanghai Project, the show’s many environmental allusions especially pointed at issues of sustainability in the fashion industry.
Armed with loose leaf newspapers and dresses made from throwaway chopsticks, student designers labored over four straight nights to craft their costumes.
“I also noticed that there were too many expired posters on campus, so I decided to turn them into floral decorations on my dress,” said Lu Ziyu ‘20.
Noting that the fashion industry is a known culprit for water contamination and excessive material wasting, Green Shanghai President Nofar Hamrany ‘18, said that the club was out to not only decrease local waste levels, but to prove that fashion design can become an effective and creative measure in addressing environmental issues.
Art Meets Environment
Echoing GoGreen spirit, the NYU Shanghai Art Gallery hosted exhibitions and workshops by Danish visual artist Rasmus Degnbol that actively examine human relationships with the planet.
Monday saw the opening of Degnbol’s photography exhibition titled Breathe, a cross disciplinary project that educates on pollution and air quality while questioning its public perception.
Breathe features a series of microscopic air sample images juxtaposed with photographs of the sites they were taken from, including many smog-hit Chinese cities like Shanghai and Xingtai in Hebei province.
“It’s the first time that I presented photographs of this project. I wanted to portray the micro-particles we all breathe in everyday, at familiar places where we live and work, and in this way, bring science and art together,” he said.
Throughout the week, the award-winning artist also gave workshops to community members on how to tell stories with an environmental lens, through portraiture and landscape photography as well as videos and mixed media.
The exhibition of the ongoing project will be on display until May 28.
Elephant Protection and Climate Change Fiction
On Tuesday, renowned conservation scientist Andrea Turkalo presented her experience and research about forest elephants, an endangered species in Africa’s Congo Basin, to an NYU Shanghai audience.
As Associate Conservation Scientist, Turkalo leads the Dzanga Forest Elephant Study, Central African Republic, a program of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
She pointed out that encroaching human activities, such as population growth, civil strife, an increase in extractive industries including logging and mining as well as the global demand for ivory, have caused the decreasing number of forest elephants.
On Thursday, Literary Reading Series hosted Australian novelist and one-time Shanghai resident James Bradley, who shared his new work Clade, a speculative fiction imagining a future shaped by catastrophic climate change through one family's multi-generational story.
Moderated by Language Lecturer David Perry, Bradley also fielded questions covering a wide range of environmental subject after the reading.
What to Expect
Join this Earth Day Conference of panels, workshops, farmers' market and the eco-fair on Saturday, from 9:30am to 5pm, for a great chance to network with stakeholders from academia, international agencies, NGOs, and ecological businesses all working for a sustainable future.
For last minute RSVPs, please go to https://nyushearthday.
GoGreen Week 2017, a student-led initiative, aims to raise awareness of environmental issues and eco-friendly solutions, and inspire positive action toward a clean, healthy world. What started as an eco-challenge for NYU Shanghai students to give up meat, has evolved into a week-long roster of environmental talks and events across all of NYU’s global campuses.
