MADRID —
Two climate activists on Saturday each glued a hand to the frames of paintings
by Spanish master Francisco Goya in Madrid to protest inaction in the face of
global warming.
اضافة اعلان
The protest at
the famed Prado museum damaged neither painting, but the protesters scrawled
“+1,5°C” on the wall between the two artworks and both were detained, police
said.
The United
Nations warned last week that the world was nowhere near the Paris Agreement
target of capping warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Saturday’s stunt
in Madrid was the latest increasingly daring action taken by climate activists
to grab the headlines, including throwing soup on Vincent van Gogh paintings in
London and Rome, and mashed potatoes on a Claude Monet masterpiece.
On Sunday,
nearly 200 nations kicked off in Egypt’s Sharm El-Sheikh the latest climate
summit tasked with taming the terrifying juggernaut of global warming.
Climate activist
group Extinction Rebellion posted a video online showing the two activists,
each with a hand fixed on a painting before museum security moved in. The group
said the two artworks in question were “The Naked Maja” and “The Clothed Maja”.
The action was
to protest rising world temperatures, which will “provoke an unstable climate
with serious consequences for all the planet”, the group said.
Videos posted by
Extinction Rebellion show the two young women pulling glue from their clothes
and sticking their hands to the frames before addressing other museum-goers.
Some people in the crowd shout at the activists before security appears and
asks those present to stop filming.
‘Desperate cry’
Spanish Culture Minister Miquel Iceta denounced the attack, writing on
Twitter that it was an “act of vandalism” and that “no cause justifies
attacking everyone’s heritage”.
It is the latest
in series of protests by climate activists targeting famous artworks in
European cities.
On Friday, a
group splashed pea soup onto a van Gogh masterpiece in Rome.
“The Sower”, an
1888 painting by the Dutch artist depicting a farmer sowing his land under a
dominating sun, was exhibited behind glass and undamaged.
Four activists
were arrested, according to news reports. The climate activists from Last
Generation called their protest “a desperate and scientifically grounded cry
that cannot be understood as mere vandalism”. They warned the protest would
continue until more attention was paid to climate change.
Other actions
have seen cake or mashed potatoes used in recent weeks.
They have
targeted masterpieces such as the “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci in the
Louvre in Paris or “Girl with a Pearl Earring” by Johannes Vermeer at The
Hague’s Mauritshuis museum.
In October, the
group Just Stop Oil threw tomato soup on van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at London’s
National Gallery.
All those
paintings were covered by glass and were undamaged.
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