Climate activists throw mashed potatoes at Monet’s work in Germany | Environmental activism | Catch My Job

Claude Monet became the latest artist to be the focus of food-related climate protests after members of a German environmental group threw mashed potatoes over one of his paintings at a Potsdam museum on Sunday.

Nine days after Just Stop Oil poured tomato soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, two activists from Letzte Generation (The Last Generation) entered the Barberini Museum and poured potatoes over Monet’s Les Meules (Haystacks) before taping their hands to the wall.

Protesters said the stunt was designed as a wake-up call to climate catastrophe. “People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying,” said one of the activists in the video of the incident tweeted by Letzte Generation.

“We are in a climate disaster and the only thing you fear is tomato soup or mashed potatoes in the picture.” You know what I’m afraid of? “I’m afraid because science tells us that we won’t be able to feed our families in 2050,” said the protester. “Does it take mashed potatoes in the picture to listen?” This picture won’t be worth anything if we have to fight over food. When will you finally start listening? When are you finally going to start listening and stop doing business as usual?”

The group said they decided to “make this Monet the stage and the public the audience” to try to get their message across. “If you need to cover a picture with mashed potatoes or tomato soup to remind society that the fossil stream is killing us all, then we give you mashed potatoes in the picture,” it added.

A museum spokesman said the painting was protected by glass, and the museum later said it was not damaged.

A spokesman said the police arrived quickly and that the protesters’ hands were “relatively easily separated from the wall”.

Last year, members of the Letzte Generation staged a hunger strike outside the Reichstag building in Berlin to protest the lack of political action on the climate emergency. Earlier this year, they stuck to some of Germany’s busiest autobahns.

The group, which accuses the German government of ignoring all warnings and bringing the country to the “brink of an abyss”, says it is part of the last generation that can prevent the collapse of society.

“Faced with this reality, we accept high.” [fines]criminal charges and deprivation of liberty fearlessly,” it states on its website.

Art galleries have recently become popular venues for attention-grabbing protests. In July, two members of the Italian climate activist group Ultima Generazione (also The Last Generation) taped their palms to the glass that protects Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and unfurled a banner that read “Ultima Generazione no gas no carbon” (Last generation, no gas, no coal).

Two weeks earlier, Just Stop Oil campaigners glued themselves to the frame of a 500-year-old painting of the Last Supper at the Royal Academy in London.