Cracking Art Group animals invading Arnoldo Mondadori Editore Head Office, Segrate, Milan, Italy, 2015 (photo)

Cracking Art Group, a collective of artists from Italy, France, and Belgium, creates public installations of massive sculptural animals made from brightly colored recyclable plastic. Such works signify and examine the rupture between the natural and the synthetic worlds, with animals representing the former and their plastic construction referring to the latter. The group’s name references the chemical process of “cracking,” by which molecules of oils are transformed into the building blocks of synthetic materials. Founded in 1993, the group sees its work as an ethical necessity in the face of environmental degradation. It operates under the belief that individuals may easily ignore a water bottle in a stream but are less likely to overlook a huge, fluorescent sculpture in a body of water—and once they do, they cannot help but think about their effect on their ecosystem