100 Landmines in Dublin

As a Dubliner, this catches my fancy: artist and activist Will St. Leger peppered Dublin's parks with over 100 metallic frisbees resembling landmines.

Will's statement:

The reason for doing this was to get people asking themselves "what if the world I walked in was littered with landmines?" They're nearly all gone now, the Police took away most of them when a tourist called the emergency number to report 'Landmines'. Afterwards, I wondered who the people of Laos, Cambodia and Iraq gonna call when they step on real landmine?

And I guess that's my big question: who does a project like this serve? In America, you'd be arrested on the spot, and I suspect even in Ireland Will was lucky not to be hauled to jail. His cause is noble: raising awareness of the thousands of people killed or maimed by landmines each year. Yet his landmines didn't offer any information on how to get in touch with organizations actively trying to prevent such atrocities. It's a preachy public service message with a terrorist undertone that offers no actual education: there is no way this 'art' could have informed, only disturbed. A cool idea, an opportunity wasted.

100 Landmines in Dublin, Ireland [Wooster Collective]

Update: The man himself clarifies...

Thanks for the inclusion on the Wired site. For the record, every landmine I
placed had a sticker on the back with information about use and effects of reallandmines. Plus the website address of the international campaign to banlandmines at www.icbl.org. This information went out in the press release I
did, but as you can imagine these important things get left out of stories.

I responded to Will, wondering how many people actually dared to pick up the fake landmines and flip them over. He responded that quite a few people did. Education complete!