M.I.A X CLEAN WAVES

M.I.A. is the nom de guerre of artist and activist Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam, whose childhood experiences growing up in the UK and Sri Lanka sparked a life-long drive to speak out against injustice and oppression. A pioneer for a global humanitarian perspective, her sound fuses elements of dancehall, electro, bhangra and baile funk to create multilingual, multi-ethnic soundscapes that elude easy classification — much like the Academy Award and Grammy-nominated artist herself.

Maya joined the resistance against plastic pollution in 2017 following a visit to Parley’s Ocean School in the Maldives, where she witnessed the damage caused to life above and below the waterline first-hand. Having applied her kaleidoscopic DIY aesthetic to clothing, album artwork and music videos in the past, Maya’s collaboration with Clean Waves marks her first foray into eyewear. Her unique series of angular color frames with interchangeable lenses reflects her fiercely independent, chameleonic spirit. Made from Ocean Plastic® intercepted from coastal communities, beaches and remote islands, M.I.A. x Clean Waves marks a new collaboration in the war against plastic – a wearable symbol of change for the oceans movement.

In this exclusive conversation with Parley for the Oceans founder Cyrill Gutsch, Maya recalls her early moments with the waves, how her childhood in the UK and Sri Lanka enabled her to join the dots between poverty and plastic pollution, and why all pirates need shades out at sea.

CYRILL: DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU WENT TO THE OCEAN?

Maya: The first time ever I went to the ocean was with my dad in India, but the first time I put my head in the ocean was in Sri Lanka. I must have been about seven or eight years old. It was one of the best days of my life.

C: WHY WAS THAT?

M: I only went to the ocean once in Sri Lanka for the first 10 years. It was really amazing, because ocean culture wasn’t part of the Tamil lifestyle in the 80s. Even though it’s an island, and tourists would go swimming, the locals didn’t really have that sea culture — but that's all changed. Also, certain Asian countries have a class system that make you believe in aspiring towards a particular kind of life, rather than finding a balance. At the ocean you would find the fishermen living by the coast, and they were seen as separate from city people — it was frowned upon for young people to be hanging out at the ocean.

C: HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SEA TODAY?

M: Now, I can’t live without it. The ocean is part of me. Our planet is 75 percent water, and we’re 75 percent water. It’s the most important element on this planet, our blue planet, our water planet. We’re going through the Age of Aquarius and we need to respect the blue because it feeds the green. That’s all there is to it.

Cyrill Gutsch, founder of Parley for the Oceans, and M.I.A.

C: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE FROM AN ISLAND?

M: I’m an islander — put me on an island and I’ll be happy. If you live on an island your way of life is tied to the ocean. It lets you see the vastness — you can see the horizon. Your eyes can look horizontally across the landscape, whereas in cities you can only look up. I also think the oceans are very cleansing. You get to make peace with the Earth every day; it almost feels like you can connect to every living being through the way the water flows. The water becomes this interface between land and living beings.

C: I BELIEVE THAT WATER KNOWS EVERYTHING, BECAUSE TECHNICALLY WE ARE ALL CONTRIBUTING TO WATER, AND WE ARE FEEDING FROM WATER. I HAVE THE FEELING THAT IT IS THE ULTIMATE SOURCE OF KNOWLEDGE 

M: Water is life. It's also a representation of emotions, and of love. Because it's something that doesn't have an edge, you can't quite describe or contain it, just to like you can't grasp the concept of love or the emotional ether. It's shapeless; it connects to a different aspect of human existence that we probably don't really know too much about. And I think the energy, or the charge of the water, must be very important to human beings because we're on this planet and not on the next planet.

C: HAVE YOU WITNESSED WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THE OCEANS — THEIR DESTRUCTION — WITH YOUR EYES?

M: Yes, in the Caribbean, which now has a seaweed problem that is apparently from farms in Brazil and Africa using too much fertilizer. The fertilizer is running through the fields and the rivers, coming to the ocean, where it gets mixed with and boosts the growth of Sargassum, which is already boosted because the temperature of the ocean has risen one or two degrees in the past few decades. And then when the seaweed lands on the coast, it gives off sulphur and other poisonous gasses which affects people’s breathing and so on. It’s just like the ashes rising from a volcano — it’s travel affects people all around the world. Farming is directly connected to what's happening on the ocean, and vice versa; what's happening in the ocean affects what's happening on the farms.

C: WHAT DOES THE THOUGHT, OR KNOWLEDGE, THAT WE MIGHT LEAVE BEHIND THE DEAD OCEAN FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS MEAN TO YOU?

M: It is mankind's arrogance. I feel like we can if we change our mindset to show respect to nature, nature will be kind and respectful to you. I’m not sure if we can say we're going to leave behind a dead ocean, because we simply don't know enough about what’s down there, right? But yeah, the oceans give us life and we’re killing our ourselves — nature heals itself, but it might just do so by getting rid of us. It's more like, do we want to be a part of a humanity that's dead inside, that no longer connects with and understands things? Because nature is everything. It's your physical body, your mental state; it’s our oceans, land, air — everything is connected. If you have a good understanding of all these things, then we are in balance. And I think issues like overpopulation, overfishing, sea piracy, poverty, plastic pollution are all symptoms of a system that is broken. You can't individually blame these on people without looking at the people that set up destructive structures that have caused our Earth to come to this point.

C: WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO THE CORE UNDERSTANDING OF OUR RELATIONSHIP TO NATURE, AND TO OTHERS.

M: We know we express power, greed, and addiction to maintaining a power structure and a power system that is leaving small countries in poverty. It’s an invasion into countries and cultures that were about preserving and living in harmony with nature, and an act of discarding these ancient, age-old systems and replacing them with ‘modernization’. All of these shortcuts are drawing on access to natural resources. By doing that, we're also directly affecting the environment — only through poverty you have overpopulation. The population grows in every poverty-stricken country because it's the only way people deal with that.

C: BECAUSE WE'RE LOSING THE OLD WAYS OF RELATING TO NATURE?

M: Exactly. Look at the Bhopal incident in India where 250,000 people were affected by this chemical fertilizer explosion — I think 15,000 people died. That was a situation where in the developing world in the 80s, we were only profit-driven, and built the factory cutting corners and ignoring regulations — there were no regulations. We can't have modernization for the sake of modernization. We can't have profit for the sake of profit.

C: EVERYTHING NEW IS GOOD BECAUSE IT'S NEW — IT'S THE WRONG THOUGHT. YOU HAVE TO BE SCEPTICAL; ENTHUSIASTIC BUT SCEPTICAL.

M: Yes. When you have imbalance in society, in the way you think, in the way the financial institutions have set up this world, and the governing bodies not really standing up to the core values of what keeps the planet ticking, then you will find imbalance in every aspect of planet Earth. And the imbalance we’ve caused in our oceans, or the food system, or the mass extinctions, is mirrored in our mental states and abilities to co-exist. All of it shows exactly the same pattern.

C: YOU ONCE TOLD ME THAT PLASTIC WAS ACTUALLY SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL WHEN YOU WERE A KID.

M: So, growing up, we still had bags made out of paper, and we would wrap things in newspaper or leaves, which we swapped for plastic somewhere in the late 80s. Our cooking pots were made out of terracotta — there was no concept of plastic plates or plastic spoons or anything like that back then. When I won a prize at school for a talent show I got a red plastic bucket, you know? We were very poor, and when I brought it home, it was the most precious important thing because it was our bathtub. I'm sure we got the most use of it as we could, but that red plastic bucket still exists. That’s what it was like in India not very long ago. It was part of the school system and how we were educated: we didn’t get a medal, but we got utility equipment, an appliance you can take home and use. Plastic became a widely used, acceptable thing within every slum and across countries that have the highest rates of poverty — exactly where we see the most waste going into the oceans. It's time to sort of rewind that and educate people.

C: WHAT DOES PLASTIC MEAN TO YOU TODAY?

M: It's like a weed. You want to get rid of it. You want to control it. It's not natural so you can't do something with it, but it's growing, and you can’t control that growth.

C: DO YOU FEEL THAT THE NEXT GENERATION WILL HAVE A DIFFERENT VIEW OF MATERIALS LIKE PLASTIC?

M: It all starts with education. But the thing is, kids today are really reliant on technology, and this is a different kind of problem — hopefully they are not afraid of nature. When people in my generation were talking about nature, they were seen as hippies and not very cool, you know? Hopefully that disappears now people are finding alternatives to plastic, like using yucca plants to make plastic bags. All this stuff comes from nature — the answers are there. You've just got to divert people's attention to nature instead of... We have to educate scientists to become more responsible, to really think it through.

C: YOU PUT SCIENTISTS AND DESIGNERS TOGETHER TO QUESTION WHAT IS ACTUALLY NEEDED AND HOW TO REPLACE THINGS THAT ARE HARMFUL. AND THEN TO REALLY DRIVE SOLUTIONS YOU THEN HAVE TO THROW AN ARTIST IN THE MIX, TO INTRODUCE NEW PERSPECTIVES TO QUESTIONS SUCH AS ‘DO WE ACTUALLY NEED THAT? IS THERE A BETTER MATERIAL OR, CAN WE RETHINK THE WHOLE PRODUCT FROM TOP TO BOTTOM?’ WHICH IS QUITE CLOSE TO THE PROCESS WE WENT THROUGH, COLLABORATING ON THE M.I.A. X CLEAN WAVES SUNGLASSES YOU’VE DESIGNED. WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO WORK ON THIS PROJECT?

M: How in the span of 70 years we’ve introduced plastic to society, that may initially have been of benefit to people — giving poor people especially access to cheaper goods that last a long time — but in that time plastic has also become our Achilles heel. It’s gotten into our food supply. It’s gotten into everything. I’ve heard there’s plastic in the snow in the Himalayas. That’s a massive wake up call. I don’t want to eat a credit card’s worth of plastic a week — I just don’t want that. We have to change it.

C: YOU ARE ALSO KNOWN FOR ALWAYS WEARING SUNGLASSES…

M: I don't get recognized when I’m not wearing sunglasses. It’s only when I put sunglasses on that people come up to me and go, ‘Hey aren’t you M.I.A.?’ And I’m like shit, I’d better take them off — my disguise is not wearing glasses.

C: THAT'S WHY WE WANTED TO WORK WITH YOU RIGHT AWAY. WE FELT THAT IF WE WERE TO MAKE SUNGLASSES FROM OCEAN PLASTIC®, THERE'S ONLY ONE PERSON THAT WE CAN START WITH, AND THAT’S YOU.

M: Well, M.I.A. is a lifestyle thing, and a philosophy — I've always shied away from putting my name to anything that promotes a lot of consumption. People ask me to make clothes and shoes or make this and make that, but I didn't want to commit to producing a ton of stuff for the sake of it. So this is me dipping my toe into producing something ethically. If you Google Maya you’ll see one of the meanings of my name is that Maya is the goddess of pollution — maybe in my case it’s sound pollution. And this project offers a solution to pollution through recycling: it’s to do with our ecosystem, food chain, and all the little fishes and birds that are so important right now.

C: WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT WITH THE SUNGLASSES YOU’VE DESIGNED?

M: These glasses are a symbol. The best thing about these sunglasses is that they come from the ocean, and the coordinates on them connect you to a place on this planet that you’re helping to clean up from plastic pollution. They’re also designed to be timeless; they’re not just a trendy thing for one season, they’re something meaningful — but if you are done with them, you can send the glasses back to me and we’ll recycle it and make another pair. All pirates need shades because it’s not easy being at sea, and we need to look cool and let it fly.

C: I QUITE LIKE HOW THE INTERCHANGEABLE LENSES GIVE YOU TWO PAIRS OF SUNGLASSES FOR THE PRICE OF ONE. IT WAS QUITE A PROCESS, RIGHT? WE STARTED IN 2017 WHEN WE WENT TO THE MALDIVES TOGETHER, AND IN THE MEANTIME WE DEVELOPED THE MATERIALS FURTHER, AS YOU WORKED ON THE DESIGNS. IT WAS QUITE A JOURNEY TOGETHER, AND I FEEL WE GREW TOGETHER IN THE PROCESS.

M: Every aspect had to be looked at — and that is the commitment that I think every brand has to make. The fact that we've taken four years to make a pair of shades shows that, no, we didn't just go to China and design a thousand pairs of shades, and here's my brand.

C: YEAH, THE EASY OPTION WOULD HAVE BEEN TO MIX UP SOME RECYCLED PLASTIC WITH VIRGIN PLASTIC AND JUST HAMMER IT OUT—WE COULD HAVE FINISHED THE GLASSES IN PRETTY MUCH A YEAR IF WE TOOK THE EASY ROUTE, BUT WE DIDN’T.

M: Exactly. And I think it's about commitment and it's about ironing out the faults in every area of the brand and not just the final product. Hopefully this is a step forward into discovering new materials and new kinds of production processes, and for the next step we’ll make these shades out of plants.

As our work progresses, we’ll bring you the latest updates from the islands. If you have a pair of Clean Waves sunglasses, be sure to activate your coordinates for personalized updates from the place you support.