DOHA: When the sun sets over the waterfront at Katara today and tomorrow, a thousand “Little Suns” will shine.
The Little Suns, designed by the artist Olafur Eliasson, are elegant hand-held lamps that produce an hour of light for every hour that they have been charged by the sun, for up to five hours. The lamps are beautiful and functional.
Today and tomorrow, they will light up COP18/CMP8’s interactive art exhibition, the “Little Sun Garden.”
As the UN Climate Change Conference’s contribution to the Doha Film Institute’s Family Day at Katara, a Little Sun Garden has been designed to delight visitors and impart lessons about climate change.
The exhibition consists of a mirrored corridor illuminated by “sunflowers,” green vines crowned by dozens of the lamps. During the day the lamps store power from the Sun, and by night they light up the corridor and are reflected by mirrors.
“They reflect (the image of the flowers) off into infinity and when they’re illuminated it will look like a field stretching off into the distance,” said Mark Jackson, the designer of the exhibition.
“Since it’s an area with a lot of sunshine, there are some nice parallels. It works perfectly in this environment.”
The effect should be spectacular, but the Little Sun Garden, is not just about aesthetics.
According to the event’s organisers at COP18/CMP8, the exhibition is designed to teach children about how their behaviour affects climate change. Along the floor of the exhibition’s corridor are footprints that get smaller as children pass through.
The footprints represent the “carbon footprint”: the net carbon emissions that result from a person’s consumption of products and transport.
Written inside the footprints are simple ideas for how to reduce carbon emissions, such as “take shorter showers” and “use both sides of paper”.
Children visiting the Little Sun Garden will meet COP18/CMP8 volunteers and staff members who will quiz them on their green living know-how.
The children will also be given marker pens so that they can write their pledges for reducing their carbon footprint on the mirrored walls.
The exhibition is COP18/CMP8’s contribution to the Doha Film Institute’s Family Day at Katara, an annual celebration that draws thousands of Qatari and visiting families for culture events and activities.
The Peninsula
