THE BALACLAVA PROJECT

Digital images, Australia and India, 2004-2005. Work never exhibited.

Text:

The Green Balaclava Project is an ongoing, continuing project that aims to create a greater awareness of the individual’s responsibilities to the environment on a global scale. The project request people to if not to change, at least think twice about what their input to improving our environment might be, and to visualise doing that by taking on a green balaclava. By participating, the person will become an important collaborator to the project that has no other political or social aim other than to link our thoughts, in a joined force towards environmental awareness. Why a green balaclava? Today’s ‘comfortable lifestyles’ and consumerism focus on the building of the individuals identity, and it’s often hard for the individual to resist things that we are made to believe that we ‘need’ to be happy and/or to be ‘someone’. The green balaclava is therefore asking the individual to give up her/his own identity while a photo is taken so that we can speak without our identity, and it might be this kind of desistance to the selfhood that is the key to a healthier environment.
                                                                                                                                                                                                    Cecilia Fogelberg, 2005