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Plastic Video Diary, Venice
AI summary Read the abstract
A researcher spent six days filming everyday life in Venice on her phone, using the simple act of recording to notice just how much plastic surrounds us, from shower caps and packaging to boat tarps and souvenir stalls, much of which we normally tune out. This isn't a health study with data, but it's a reminder worth taking seriously: plastic is so woven into daily life that we barely register it, even though tiny fragments (microplastics) from these everyday items can break down and end up in our environment, food, and bodies over time.
An experimental film made with a mobile phone over six days in Venice during a research visit in June 2026, using the camera as a way to become more aware of the presence and actions of plastic in everyday life. It is the second plastic video diary, after Plastic Video Diary, Barcelona (July 2024, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22690151). The film observes the city's refuse choreography, daily work on canal barges, the plastic consumed and rubbish encountered, the ubiquity of single-use plastic from shower caps to packaging, and the mundane presence of synthetic polymers at different scales among other matter and other life. Locations include Ca' Foscari University, the Biennale Arte 2026 and the city's squares, gardens and waterways. It contemplates canal moorings, tarpaulins weathering, cable insulation, a fish market and a robotic mower, the residue of consumption and tourism at souvenir stalls and overflowing bins. The sound of plastic, such as a frisbee landing on paving, often becomes part of its presence. The film also shows the observer observing, the diarist's hands or feet in the frame, and the phone itself as both a means of mediation and instrument of awareness. At the Biennale, passages include layered footage of two works, Dennis's Black Earth Calendar and Maravilla's Disease Throwers, so that organic and synthetic materials appear through one another, and encounters with artworks alluding to lives that depend on plastic. Research context: The video diary is part of research about plastics and forms one component of a multimodal approach to studying modern materiality and the synthetically altered conditions of life. It employs the video-diary method set out in the Guide for a Remote Participatory Video Lab: Tracing Plastic Materiality (EASA2024), in which the act of filming, rather than the recording, is a way of noticing and sensing plastics and the micro- and nanoplastics that cannot be easily seen. The diary is an experiment in sensory ethnography (Pink, 2009; Stoller, 1989) carried out in a low-tech, daily format using one mobile phone, no script and no staging of subjects. The intentional use of a camera to observe plastics changes the observer, making them more aware of synthetic polymers at different scales, from the object in hand to infrastructure and the particles and potential toxicities that cannot be seen (cf. Shapiro, 2015). Sound is treated as an equal witness. Plastics are both mundane and interlaced through everything in modern materiality (Gabrys, Hawkins, & Michael, 2013; Pathak & Nichter, 2019), and leak all over throughout their lives (cf. Hardon et al., 2025). Grasping this condition calls for a multimodal approach, alongside archaeology's attention to plastics (Godin, Pétursdóttir, Praet, & Schofield, 2024) and the study of pollution as a relation of power (Liboiron, 2021). Part of a series of plastic video diaries and Tracing Plastic Materiality. A related work is Plastic Video Diary, Barcelona (2024), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22690151. Ethics and third-party content: Filmed in public space and in exhibition spaces open to the public. No individuals are identified, and where visible, effort has been made to show passers-by at a distance or from behind, without faces. Some individuals are shown working, in which case faces have been blurred. Artworks appear only in part, are credited on screen and are copyright of the artists: Guadalupe Maravilla, Disease Thrower works (2024–2025); Nolan Oswald Dennis, Black Earth Calendar (2026); Daniel Lind-Ramos, Guardaverde (2024–2025); Ei Arakawa-Nash, Grass Babies, Moon Babies (2026). The licence registered applies to the film as the author's work and not to works depicted in it. Method and structure: Hand-held iPhone 16 video footage recorded on location in 4K HDR. No audible narration used and no staging of subjects. Individual faces were blurred for privacy. Video clips were reduced to about a hundred segments in the order of the days experienced. Six dated chapters from 7–12 June 2026 were separated by fades. Sound was carried across some of the cuts for coherence. Tone-mapping from HLG to standard dynamic range (BT.709). The film is presented in the phone's original portrait format (9:16). Format: Two video files are available, an archival master (11 min 35 s, 3.95 GB, MP4, H.264 High@L5.2, 2160×3840, portrait 9:16, 60 fps, AAC stereo 192 kbps 48 kHz) and a viewing copy (11 min 35 s, 1.40 GB, MP4, H.264, 1080×1920, 60 fps, AAC stereo 192 kbps 48 kHz). The two versions are identical in content and best viewed on a phone or a rotated display with sound due to the portrait format. Licence and citation: Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 for the film Plastic Video Diary, Venice. Artworks depicted remain copyright of the artists. Suggested citation: Simpson, I. R. (2026). Plastic Video Diary, Venice [Video]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22690282 References: Gabrys, J., Hawkins, G., & Michael, M. (Eds.). (2013). Accumulation: the material politics of plastic. London: Routledge. Godin, G., Pétursdóttir, Þ., Praet, E., & Schofield, J. (Eds.). (2024). The Routledge handbook of archaeology and plastics. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Hardon, A., Dey, T., Pakasi, D., Taqueban, E. M., Hidayana, I., & Nichter, M. (2025). Confronting the material and structural leakiness of plastics: insights from multi-sited ethnography in India, Indonesia and the Philippines. Cambridge Prisms: Plastics, 3, Article e27. doi:10.1017/plc.2025.10022 Liboiron, M. (2021). Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pathak, G., & Nichter, M. (2019). The Anthropology of Plastics: An Agenda for Local Studies of a Global Matter of Concern. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 33(3), 307-326. doi:https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12514 Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. London: SAGE. Shapiro, N. E. (2015). Attuning to the chemosphere: domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime. Cultural Anthropology, 30(3), 368-393. Stoller, P. (1989). The taste of ethnographic things: the senses in anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
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