Art installation at Leonardo da Vinci Airport raises awareness on environmental issues

Passengers at Leonardo da Vinci are now able to admire, in the setting of the square in boarding area A, the work – never before exhibited to the public – by the artist Marcantonio called “Grande Anima”.

It is a work of contemporary art with a strong visual impact. It reproduces in its original size, twelve metres long and weighing over 700kgs, the skeleton of a whale, illuminated inside by lamps from all over the world.

With the installation of ‘Grande Anima’, Aeroporti di Roma once again confirms its commitment to raising public awareness on environmental issues such as saving water and recovering plastic, the leading cause of pollution of the seas, this time through culture.

Attention to the environment has led Leonardo da Vinci, one of the few airports in the world, to equip itself with a dual network that allows drinking water to be used only for strictly necessary uses and industrial water for all other needs. Thanks to these systems, more than 66% of the water used at the airport is non-potable water, and the saving of drinking water amounts to more than one million cubic metres per year, corresponding to almost 500 Olympic-size swimming pools. Also, on the issue of waste, ADR has always been at the forefront, promoting a circular economy based on reducing the use of single-use plastics and increasing separation and recycling by involving all airport operators.

Siamo felici di aver ospitato oggi, alla presenza del Ministro della Cultura #GennaroSangiuliano, l’inaugurazione dell’opera “Grande Anima” di #Marcantonio, presso il Terminal 1 dell’aeroporto di #Fiumicino.@EnacGov pic.twitter.com/aAXeV5ohh4

— Aeroporti di Roma (@AeroportidiRoma) January 20, 2023

“Grande Anima reminds us how essential it is to take care of the environment and especially how humanity and other species are closely interdependent. Besides reminding us all, with this significant visual impact, that every behaviour impacts the planet, it also allows us to tell our passengers about the full integration of the ESG strategy into our business.

“With this work, we continue, as Europe’s best airport for quality for five years, on our path to building the airport of the future: not only a bridge to the world but a place for reflection, contamination and growth, including cultural growth.

“It is precisely this vision that has led us for some time now towards defining Leonardo da Vinci as The Careport, a word that integrates the concept of care at the heart of the airport: we want to welcome our passengers in a sustainable, caring and genuinely inclusive world,” commented ADR CEO, Marco Troncone.

“I am thrilled to present my work for the first time ever in such a unique context as an airport. Grand Anima invites us to reflect on the condition of our oceans and even more intensely on life and death, the potential of care, attention and the consequences of the individualism that breeds our lifestyle. But this vision has an oneiric solid, dream and fairy tale component. I want to create beauty, not denunciation, dream, and rhetoric. In this undefined, bittersweet play between dramatic representation and magical vision, the whale lives and flies lit by lights that belong to our world, our society: we are the lights. Thus an infinite game of cause and effect, of blame and merit, arises, in which we are the authors of the fate of nature, and thus of ourselves,” explained the author of Grande Anima, Marcantonio.

The initiative is supported by One Ocean Foundation, a non-profit foundation working internationally with institutions, companies and individuals to safeguard the oceans; ASVIS, the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development, the most prominent Italian civil society network, committed to the promotion of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda, and Cultura Italiae, the association whose primary purpose is to disseminate and promote projects, concrete actions and good practices aimed at supporting the world of culture to stimulate, through it, the growth and ethical, social and economic development of individuals and communities as a whole, improving relations between peoples. Cultura Italiae, among others, also oversaw the selection of the work for the criteria of sustainability and environmental awareness.

Through the special QR code, in collaboration with Chora Media, travellers will be able to listen, via podcast, to the story ‘Grande Anima – La balena di Fiumicino’, which tells the story of the grey whale that arrived in 2021 off the coast of Fiumicino after various stops, including the Gulf of Naples and Anzio.