Plastic Ville

The project grew out of Susan Freinkel's book "Plastic: A Toxic Love Story", a text that has acted as a mirror, showing me the reflection of my own consumption as part of a structural problem of constant disposal. Plastic is cheap, waterproof, light and durable, able to insulate against temperature and sound, not to mention its many variants and finishes; it seems the ideal material to build with. Yet it poisons the environment from its very first breath and fragments down to nanometric scale to enter other bodies, with irreversible effects.

This series of digital images recreates urban settlements along the coast or on the sea, using donated and personal plastic waste that is sorted to build each arrangement. The scenes are built on a reflective surface that evokes water, but that also invites reflection on the image the surface gives back to us. The titles of the images refer to colors: a wide palette that starts from raw black, yet with various additives and finishes the plastics industry makes resins that can reproduce almost anything and that are slowly replacing organic matter to form plastic villages.