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CLIMATE CRISIS

Climate activists pour paint on Charles Ray sculpture in Paris

Environmental activists on Friday dumped orange paint over an outdoor sculpture by the American artist Charles Ray in central Paris, the latest in a string of artwork defacements aimed at spurring greater government efforts to fight climate change.

Published: 18 November 2022 17:25 CET
Climate activists pour paint on Charles Ray sculpture in Paris
Workers clean up the 'Horse and Rider' statue by the artist Charles Ray, after climate activists threw paint on it (Photo by Alain JOCARD / AFP)

The lifesize “Horse and Rider” stands in front of the Bourse de Commerce contemporary art museum, which houses part of the collection of French fashion billionaire Francois Pinault.

The action was claimed by Derniere Renovation (“Last Renewal”), which showed two activists kneeling and holding hands in front of the doused sculpture on its website.

They had also put a white T-shift over the rider with the phrase “We have 858 days left”, apparently a reference to studies that say carbon emissions must peak by 2025 if the planet is to have a viable future.

“Eco-vandalism is taken up a notch,” Culture Minister Rima Abdel Malak, who visited the site as workers cleaned up the paint, wrote on Twitter.

“Art and ecology are not incompatible. It’s the opposite, they are common causes,” she said.

The incident came as climate activists targeted an Andy Warhol work in Milan on Friday, covering a car repainted by the American pop artist with flour — two weeks after the same group threw pea soup at a Van Gogh painting in Rome.

Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” in The Hague and Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in London have also been targeted, drawing widespread condemnation from officials.

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CLIMATE CRISIS

Rising sea levels threaten Normandy’s historic D-Day beaches

As France prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, erosion and rising sea levels are threatening to strip away what remains of the physical history of the Allied invasion of Europe

Published: 7 May 2024 14:47 CEST
Updated: 11 May 2024 08:14 CEST
Rising sea levels threaten Normandy's historic D-Day beaches

From Ouistreham (Calvados) to Ravenoville (Manche), the Normandy coastline is littered with relics of June 1944. The Normandy tourism office lists more than 90 official D-Day sites, including 44 museums, drawing millions of visitors every year.

But the sea from where liberation came is now threatening to reclaim its heritage: cliffs and dunes are subject to erosion, while marshes and reclaimed land are at risk of being submerged.

The landscapes today of the famed beaches are nothing like the ones codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword, that the Allied forces endured in 1944, an official for the Conservatoire du Littoral in Normandy told AFP. 

The Gold Beach marshes in Ver-sur-Mer, “will be transformed in 10 years or so,” he added, as sea water rises to reclaim land that had been drained in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Mayor of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont and director of the Utah Beach Museum Charles de Vallavieille told Ouest France that  “we don’t have the right to do anything” to stop the advance of the sea. “The law protects dykes but not dunes,” he said. “We can’t get any help even though it’s a problem that affects the whole coast – protect one place and the water will go elsewhere”.

Pedestrians walk past remains of the British Artificial harbour at “Gold Beach”. (Photo by Lou BENOIST / AFP)

Between the American and British sectors, the Bessin cliffs – where German artillery batteries pummelled the beaches from hard-to-reach areas such as Pointe du Hoc – have been slowly falling to wave impacts, sea salt, freezes and thaws in the decades since 200 American rangers overran the occupying soldiers there. 

In 2010, the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), which manages the site, spent $6million to protect it. It “secured the area, [and] consolidated 70 metres […] with reinforced concrete walls, micropiles to stabilise the soil and a complex network of sensors monitoring the subsoil for any significant movement”.

Coastal pathways in the area have been “set back 20 metres” to ensure public safety, the ABMC has said.

But with sea levels rising a few millimetres a year, inexorably and inevitably changing the face of the coastline, nature is reclaiming the beaches of Normandy, and their blood-stained human history will become a matter of historical interpretation, rather physical fact.

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