The profile of an elegant metallic tree flirts with the silhouette of the impressive mountains that surround the Sagarmatha Next Cultural Center in Nepal’s Khumbu Valley. The Canadian Floyd Elzinga is the author of this and other sculptures that are 3,775 meters above sea level, on the route chosen every year by thousands of hikers to reach Everest base camp. Elzinga has turned to construction waste, old appliances salvaged from landfills, and even parts of a Russian helicopter that crashed very close by in 2003, to create works in the workshop skilled in this kind of height museum This enclave in the Himalayas has been exhibiting garbage transformed into art since a year ago, when it opened its doors, with a clear educational mission.
Seventy years after New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Tenzing Norgay became the first human beings to set foot on the roof of the world, at 8,849 meters, and return alive to tell about it, the accumulation of waste on this mountain, and in general throughout the region, it is an environmental problem that requires urgent solutions. The promoters of Sagarmatha Next have focused on finding ways to dispose of the solid waste that ends up in around eighty landfills spread across the Khumbu Valley. Another story is the shameful filth that surfaces in the high altitude camps of Everest.
These days, coinciding with the celebrations for the feat of Hillary and Norgay, on May 29, bleak images of empty oxygen bottles, tents, plastics and other products abandoned at more than 8,000 meters have been broadcast.
One of the architects of this cultural complex is the Swede Tommy Gustafsson, who precisely in 2011 joined an Everest cleaning expedition. “In one month we removed nine tons of garbage and the following year we started talking about this project, to help manage waste in the Khumbu region, to promote recycling, to create art with waste and to do pedagogy between the local population and foreign visitors”, explains Gustafsson, based in Nepal.
Everest (Sagarmatha for the Nepalese), a magnet for vanities, has been used as a symbol to try to make the message of respect for nature take hold.
Gustafsson comments that every year at least 60,000 tourists, accompanied by 20,000 guides, porters, cooks and other workers from different parts of Nepal, enter the Khumbu Valley, home to 9,000 inhabitants, to trek or climb peaks. This important human flow brings dividends but also generates nearly 800 kilos of waste every day, which mainly end up in the eighty landfills where they are burned. Gustafsson and several foundations he has partnered with want to valorize garbage and have it treated to prevent it from damaging the environment.
Different programs gravitate around Sagarmatha Next, including the artist residency for creators from all over the world, such as the Canadian Floyd Elzinga, the German Rocco and his brothers or the American Emma Fern Curtis. The three settled for a season last year in this complex at the foot of Everest, in Syangboche, to develop their work using refuse.
Rocco and his brothers collected a thousand empty beer cans to weave in front of the brand new museum an installation inspired by the Tibetan prayer flags that hang in every house. Next to it, as you can see in the photograph, two metal trees emerge that are part of the set of twenty-five works that Elzinga made during his fruitful stay in this corner of the Himalayas.
Emma Fern Curtis chose to paint on scraps of plywood and scraps of cardboard. He also used the latter product salvaged from trash cans as picture frames, and plastic bottle caps to hang his canvases in the Denali Schmidt Gallery in the Sagarmatha Next main building. After this experience, Fern Curtis studies how to continue betting on recycling in her work.
This gallery permanently exhibits other assemblages made by young artists, mostly Nepali, such as Kumar Thapa, Hishila Maharjan, Suraj Subba Limbu and Saurav Koirala, who have turned to scrap metal and old soda cans to complete their proposals.
