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The MAB Programme artistic collaboration project with Vik Muniz

6 April 2021

Last update:20 April 2023

Vik Muniz artwork with pictures and fabrics from Biosphere Reserves

Throughout 2021, UNESCO will be celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Man and Biosphere (MAB) Programme, whose pioneering concept of sustainable development intertwines the conservation and sustainable use of biological and cultural diversity, and now consist of 714 biosphere reserves in 129 countries, including 21 transboundary sites.

To celebrate its anniversary, we asked UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Vik Muniz to be with us. This partnership was announced on « Our Planet, Our Future: 50 Years of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme » on March 24th 2021.

Vik Muniz is a renowned Brazilian contemporary artist, with works of art displayed in the most influential museums of the world. He was designated UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador in 2011 in light of his activism for sustainable development, as well as use of art education for social inclusion and sustainability.

He began his career as a sculptor but gradually became more interested in photographic reproductions of his work, eventually turning his attention exclusively to photography. He incorporates a multiplicity of unlikely materials into this photographic process. Mr Muniz has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to give them a new meaning, which is particularly suitable for this project with the MAB Programme.

For this peace of art, Vik Muniz is to use fabrics and photos of materials collected in different volunteer UNESCO designated Biosphere Reserves across the world, representing their cultural and biological uniqueness and relationships with the living. This work of art would propose an inspiring and positive representation of people’s relationship with their environment, pointing to a world where harmonious living is key for securing the livelihoods of future generations. A new normal for a sustainable healthy planet Earth, for present and next generations.

This artwork is meant to demonstrate the interdependency and intertwined faith between human’s life and other species. Vik Muniz’s piece will be presented during UNESCO’s General Conference and major sustainable development-related events.

In 1967, Stewart Brand managed to convince NASA to use its ATS-3 satellite to produce a picture of the entire circumference of our planet. The Whole Earth Picture, as it became known, made it possible for mankind to imagine itself living in a same unique and finite space and became a symbol of ecological unity. But the whole is just as important as its parts. The Whole Earth Picture is a powerful symbol but it is distant and abstract. As a mosaic artist, for many decades I have tried to combine and create a revealing tension between the parts and the whole, between the symbol and its necessity, like a message that reveals its own grammar. The most ambitious scientific approaches will necessarily have to capture people’s imagination in order to really succeed at a significant human level. I believe that as an artist I can be a useful partner in promoting, to borrow Gregory Bateson’s words, this necessary “Ecology of Mind” and I am extremely honoured to be a part of the great mosaic that the 50th Anniversary of UNESCO Man and Biosphere program is bound to be.

Vik Muniz, Artist, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador