IMAGE COURTESY OF MARA G. HASELTINELast Saturday evening (March 9) at a gallery space in SoHo, New York, the aria “Che gelida manina” (“What a cold little hand”) from Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème reverberated around a room packed with people. Puccini’s poet Rodolfo sang passionately, this time not to beautiful Mimì, the seamstress sick with consumption, but to a pair of giant planktonic creatures ensnarled in a thick plastic ribbon. It was the opening of “La Bohème: A Portrait of Our Oceans in Peril,” a solo exhibition by artist and environmentalist Mara G. Haseltine.
In Puccini’s opera, Rodolfo sings to Mimì under the moonlight. Soon they are in love but a shadow hangs over them; Mimi's gelida manina foreshadows her demise. To Haseltine, Mimì represents our ailing oceans, poisoned by human activity.
Wherever she goes, Haseltine collects water samples, which she later inspects for plankton under the microscopes of Genspace, a nonprofit that promotes citizen science. Haseltine noticed that all her samples were contaminated with fine particles of sunlight-degraded plastic. “I have collected plankton from really remote places such as an oasis in the Sahara,” says Haseltine. When she found plastic even there, she was dismayed. “It was a horrifying realization.” That’s when she arrived at the concept of falling in love with something that you know is dying, ...
