fish without faces: Matter out of Place

When traveling to install his next exhibition, photographer Alejandro Durán starts by checking suitcases full of still-sandy plastic garbage from over 40 countries, all washed up on just one particular beach on the windward side of the Yucatán. Among the collection, for example, there’s a red flyswatter advertising an insurance company in Warsaw, Indiana, still in unsettlingly good condition. Among other things, Durán is reminding us that when these things appear to leave our hands and homes, there is no “away.”

All this plastic, along with Durán’s large scale photos, went up at the Granary Art Center earlier this summer. The installation and opening coincided with the provincial bustle, deep-fryer haze, and cheap disposable plastic toys, dishes, and cutlery of Ephraim’s Scandinavia Days festival taking place on the same block that same weekend. If we define trash as “matter out of place,” all this seemed at once wonderfully strange and foreign, even exotic, and at the same time uncannily right at home.

The first morning of the install, I took Alejandro on a quick trash tour and photo shoot in the piñon-juniper forests of Black Hill, just east of town. The standard rural rubbish: burned-out mattresses and other furniture; shot-up TVs and other appliances; the bodies of deer, elk, sheep, dogs, and other creatures, matted in miasmic heaps of fur, teeth, and bones. Also, and probably most striking, are the great big knotted bundles of colorful plastic baling twine, dumped in ditches at the edge of alfalfa fields. How compelling he found all this, or how much he was just indulging me, he was too kind and gracious for me to really know, but he did seem to like the neon-orange-on-green contrasts of the baling twine half-overgrown in junegrass. Lots of photos there. (Incidentally, junegrass, sort of like trash, occurs abundantly on every continent and most islands on the planet except, unlike trash, Antarctica.)

from the show statement:

“Washed Up is an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international debris washing up on Mexico's Caribbean coast into aesthetic yet disquieting works.

“Over the course of this project Durán has identified plastic waste from fifty-eight nations and territories on six continents that have washed ashore along the coast of Sian Ka'an, Mexico's largest federally protected reserve and an UNESCO World Heritage site. He uses this international debris to create color-based, site-specific sculptures that conflate the hand of man and nature. At times he distributes the objects the way the waves would; at other times, the plastic mimics algae, roots, rivers, or fruit, reflecting the infiltration of plastics into the natural environment.

“More than creating a surreal or fantastical landscape, these installations mirror the reality of our current environmental predicament. The resulting photo series depicts a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our culture of disposable products. The alchemy of Washed Up lies not only in transforming a trashed landscape, but in the project’s potential to raise awareness and change our relationship to consumption and waste.”

The ubiquitous accumulation and, in turns sublime, in turns ghastly scale and permanence of (hu)man-made things now seems a definitive characteristic of our moment and era, one that our aesthetics are still struggling to catch up with. (Lucky for us all, this blog isn’t the kind of place for one to hold fourth on things like late capitalism and “zeitgeists,” or we might all be in for a real jeremiad.) But here are a couple more illustrations of the above fact:

“Shrouded in trash bags, the men of El Derramadero walked down from their native mountain and returned three days later pulling a wagon filled with slabs of plastic. Once in El Derramadero, the wagon collapsed and was thrown into the fire pit where they melted the plastic, shaping it into cutting shanks for butchering and forming forks and spoons, letting them cool before sliding them into their utensil trays. They cleared the clumps of mud where their old adobes used to stand and molded igloos complete with plastic hinges. But although the people of el Derramadero were happy for having triumphed over their town’s name, Julieta did not want to live in a town made from melted plastic.”

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper (2005)

“The Matacão, scientists asserted, had been formed for the most part within the last century, paralleling the development of the more common forms of plastic, polyurethane and styrofoam. Enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable material buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth had undergone tremendous pressure, pushed ever farther into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle. The liquid deposits of the molten mass had been squeezed through underground veins to virgin areas across the earth. The Amazon Forest, being one of the last virgin areas on Earth, got plenty.”

Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990)