Glass Artworks
Glass art is prevalent in the Bavarian Forest region, where the first part of the International Youth Summit took place. During their stay in the National Park, the young participants created two artworks – under the direction and with the help of the local glass artist Karlheinz Pauly (called Leines). The ecological footprint model provided inspiration. It is an indicator model, developed for the most part at the University of British Columbia in Canada. The Global Footprint Network defines a population’s ecological footprint as the amount of productive land and water it needs to produce, transport, process and dispose of all the resources it consumes using prevailing technology.
The first piece of glass artwork has been the “Flying Footprint”: it consists of a series of suspended glass display cases that were installed at the “Expo of Diversity” in Bonn and formed the route from the entrance to the Youth Summit stand. The young people filled the cases with natural products – their symbols of the biological and cultural diversity of their country. The cases have been insulated by a vacuum space to preserve the symbols.
The second artwork was also made mainly of glass: the “Puzzle of BioDiv” consists of 16 glass elements into which the ecological footprint of each country has been incorporated. The participants from each country also had the opportunity to create their glass element using a technique by which coloured glass is fused together. Only the surface of the footprint remained untreated, i.e. transparent. The individual elements linked together and, could be seen as a whole, and formed the shape of a footprint.
