USA: Sculptures made of food cans compete in a competition for a good cause in New York City

Tomato pulp, tuna, pineapple chunks, peaches, coffee -- there is an abundance of all this and other food in an offbeat sculpture competition in New York City. No, the food doesn't smell and things don't get sticky or messy. The cornucopia of food is all contained in cans, which have been put together in elaborate designs and sculptures. As part of the 14th Annual NYC Design/Builld Competition under the "Canstruction" initiative, 42 teams from across America participated in designing giant sculptures made entirely out of canned foods. After opening the sculptures to visitors for a few days, who have to donate at least one can to enter the exhibition, the structures will eventually be dismantled and the food donated to City Harvest, a non-profit organization based in New York City which claims that it is the city's only food rescue program and which has the aim of helping the hungry across the five boroughs. Cheri Melillo, the National Executive Director and President of "Canstruction", talked about how the concept of raising food through can sculptures came about. "It was a concept as a food drive initially -- that you raise food and the person that raised the most food would get to build something with it. These were architecture and engineering firms and we flipped that and we made it a design build competition where the can food drive would come from the structures that you designed and built," Melillo said. In the 2006 competition, Melillo said 153,000 cans of food were used. Melillo said that she hopes that her organization will raise at least 2 million pounds of food this year through a host of such competitions in different cities. There were a few guidelines that the competing designers had to follow in the competition-- sculptures have to be 10 feet by 10 feet and 8 feet tall. Some levelling materials can be used in order to keep the can structures from falling, such as one quarter inch of cardboard, rubber bands, plastic tape and wire. However, no material can be used for structural support and the sculptures have to be build in such a way than the cans hold together and provide their own support. Also, all the sculptures had to be built from scratch in the course of one night, even if the design teams had practised or planned their technique earlier. While there is a surfeit of recognizable forms in this year's competition, such as sea serpents, dragons, apples and lady bugs, one structure that stood out in its abstractness was the "Mobius Strip". A Mobius Strip is understood to be a continuous loop made by twisting a rectangular band 180 degrees and joining the ends together, creating a surface that has only one side and one edge. The design team behind the sculpture said their motto was -- "One side, one edge, one goal -- end hunger." One of the members of the design team behind the Mobius STrip sculpture, Steve Dodd, said that their motivation was the fact that they didn't want to create a commonly recognizable form as they had in past years of the competition. "This year we wanted to challenge ourselves a bit and push the envelope and we almost pushed it too far. But this one isn't a natural form but it's sort of an abstract form which has it's own sculptural qualities, which we're trying to do rather than something that was just a figural sculpture," said Dodd. The "Mobius Strip" used 3000 cans of salmon and 500 cans of tuna fish and took 12 to 14 hours to be built. Another team fashioned a space shuttle themed on the concept of "A shuttle fuelled to end hunger", which used 1876 cans of food in varying sizes, dominated by tuna fish cans. The team behind the space shuttle said they spend about 2500 U.S. dollars on the design. Jilly Stephens, Executive Director of City Harvest, the organization that will receive all the cans from the sculptures as well as the cans collected from visitors, said the competition was helpful not just in raising food but also in raising awareness about the number of hungry people in a city like New York. "Competitions like Canstruction are really important to organizations like City Harvest. Aside from the food, the terrific food that we are going to be picking up and taking to feed over a quarter of million people in New York City every week, we can raise the awareness through our collaboration with Canstruction, raise awareness that there is a problem for hunger in New York City and we know that over a million people are turning to emergency food every year," said Stephens. The "Canstruction" can sculptures will be open to public viewing, starting November 9 till the 22nd of the month.

ITN Source | November 17, 2006

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