Brazil Gets Its Very Own Stonehenge for Rio Olympics
Brazil Gets Its Very Own Stonehenge for Rio Olympics
By Alanna Martinez • 05/19/16 4:13pm
[font size=1]
Rendering of Mariko Mori's Ring: One With Nature (2016) presented by the Faou Foundation.Rendering of Mariko Mori’s Ring: One With Nature (2016) presented by the Faou Foundation. (Photo: Courtesy Faou Foundation)
[/font]
Through a complicated system of motorized pulleys, Japanese artist Mariko Mori has raised a ten-foot-wide ring to the top of a waterfall in the Brazilian rainforest. On August 2, three days before the 2016 Summer Olympics kick off in nearby Rio de Janiero, Ms. Mori’s sculpture, Ring: One With Nature, will be unveiled to the public, and her dream of bringing a modern-day, 21st-century Stonehenge to every habitable continent on Earth will be one step closer to reality.
The giant acrylic sculpture is the second in a series of six that Ms. Mori envisions placing at strategic locations worldwide. In 2010, the artist founded the environmental nonprofit Faou Foundation, with the goal of creating monumental artworks for unique ecological environments throughout the world. Ms. Mori also plans to create pieces for Europe, North America, Western Australia, and South Africa. (For the latter she already has a “vision in her head” for a location.) The works, inspired by the history’s great structures such as the Pyramids at Giza and Moai of Easter Island, are meant to spread ecological awareness and allow viewers to “confront nature” through art, Ms. Mori told the Observer.
Her first project with Faou, a 14-foot-tall opaque megalith titled Sun Pillar that changes colors in sunlight, was erected on Japan’s Miyako Island in Okinawa in 2011. The sculpture’s location on the island’s small bay was chosen for its alignment with the sun during the Winter Solstice. The piece is one half of a work she calls Primal Rhythm, which will be completed in the near future with the addition of a floating orb installed in the center of the bay that changes colors with the tides.
Like Sun Pillar, Ring‘s spot atop Brazil’s 190-foot-tall Véu da Noiva waterfall—just an hour and a half from Rio and a six minute walk from the entrance of a state park—will also align with the sun during the shortest day of the year on December 21, and changes color from blue to gold in the light. Beside its astrological alignment, Ms. Mori required only that the work’s location have a “very, very magical appearance” and “magnificent rainforest energy.”
More:
http://observer.com/2016/05/brazil-gets-its-very-own-stonehenge-for-rio-olympics/
[center]
"Sun Pillar" on Okinawa
Artist's rendering of the Ring. [/center]
More images of her work:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p012wbdn/p012wb0d