The Obstinacy of Things deals with marine litter. Living in a world that is more and more “shaped by human activity but ... also increasingly outside of human control” (1), marine litter, in particular plastic, is an appropriate representation of both our ingenuity and creativity but also our inefficacy to foresee our impact on our environment.
Bjørnar Olse and Þóra Pétursdóttir point out that sea-borne debris (as well as industrial wasteland or sunken nuclear submarines) is considered a threat to heritage, and not heritage itself. It might be unwanted heritage, but it is still our legacy. While they specify that “the aim is neither to trivialize the serious environmental problems caused by sea-borne debris nor to suggest specific programs of action”, they are suggesting an alternative to our concept of marine litter. Their aim is to develop “less anthropocentric and more ecologically adept heritage understandings”(2).
In light of this it might be useful to redefine our understanding of ‘ownership’ of our creations. Mass-producing plastic should not mean mass-forgetting their existence once their human use has been fulfilled. Their lives do carry on afterwards, therefore it feels apt to pay attention to this final stage, an abandoned man-made object left to very slowly decompose in the natural environment, entangled with many lives. This is what the Obstinacy of Things is aiming to do by highlighting its interaction with nature in its 'after-life'.
In this installation work, signs of life growing on marine litter are the focus of the investigation. Pieces of plastic have been collected from the Icelandic coast, and a study of the vegetal and animal life growing on the plastic was produced through video work and an interactive installation. The latter has permitted the public to become active observers of the intricate relationship of nature and human waste, considering marine litter’s presence as an animate material after human use, interacting with the landscape, and still very much a part of our world.
(1): Bubandt N. (2017) Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press
(2): Olsen B., Pétursdóttir Þ. (2016) Unruly Heritage: Tracing legacies in the Anthropocene. Arkæologisk Forum, 35.
This work was shown at the Akureyri Art Museum, and TBA21-Academy: Ocean-Archive