Lessons of plastic (Work-in-progress) 2026
photo Β© Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Atlantic Ocean Azores 2026
Perhaps plastic waste is asking us to learn to be more responsible, more intertwined. Plastic material illustrates how we relate to the world around us.
photo Β© Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Atlantic Ocean Azores 2026
In this emerging work, Lesson of plastic, we strive for new ways of relating, strange compositions and making connections that encourage new ways of thinking and relating to matter. We are interested in how the children and local communities on the island relate to plastic waste. What future they see in it. Is it a threat or some strange hybrid tool that we have yet to discover?
photo Β© Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Atlantic Ocean Azores 2026
We wonder what the epistemological effects of plastic are, because This material remains on our hands potentially thousands of years into the future. It settles into the biological world and the geological strata.
Ocean currents often carry vast quantities of things that then travel through the oceans, from various species of tree species to shells, animals, fishing gear to the bodies of people drowned in the seas and oceans.
The grouping of plastic and other fragments reveals an important lesson about the nature of plastic matter itself: it cannot simply be separated, separated from other forms. They are not just in the synthetic matter category, as we might assume.
These are not two or more distinct substances, but are new types of hybrid material. Plastic’s ability is to transform into all sorts of shapes, to penetrate all environments, to reconfigure what is often understood to be solid, even the stone beneath our feet. This substance, characterized by its universality, eventually blends back into the earth and becomes part of the environment.
Despite the fact that, as humans, no matter how hard we try to separate matter from mind, or synthetic materials from natural objects, there is only ever the reciprocity and interaction of matter in the world.
Β© Photographs of objects from washed-up material – Sea-Water Amplification (SWA) Atlantic Ocean Azores 2026
More soon ….
Related activities:
π π½ππππ ππ π₯ππ€: Autumn in the Atlantic Ocean, 2025
π Thinking with space-time dimension of place (VI), Open Spatial Laboratory, A Sea bike, 2025
π Thinking with space-time dimension of place (III), Open Spatial Laboratory, 2024
