“The Rejected Remains as Fact”

Recently, in liberal discourses of global ecology, plastics have been named as an enemy of human contemporaneity. Also, future artistic responses to the contradictions of plastic have increasingly shifted from environmental fears to the exploration of ambivalent human affects towards the stubborn presence of polymers outside the domain of what seems exterior. The knowledge of microplastics and nanoplastics, as a result of the mechanical disintegration of plastic waste, resonates since the 2010s in the proliferation of artworks subverting the common-sense assumption of the toxicity of plastic by activating the tension between plastic's object-ness and subject-ness (Schaag, 2020: 15). Both visual and performative assemblages, especially indebted to the discovery of the plastiglomerate phenomenon of synthetic rock, explore the embeddedness of plastic within nature, and imagine speculative scenarios of living with plastic debris as human's “toxic progeny” (Davis, 2022: 81–102). As a consequence, artistic investigations of the plastisphere's various dimensions (i.e. economic, environmental, cultural) are shifting from the present-day reality to a hypothetical future of plastic–human co-existence. As the art historian and theorist, Amanda Boetzkes, argues, “plastic is always already a futural form” (2019: 214). That is why numerous projects, such as the widely recognisable and commented works of the kinetic sculptor Pinar Yoldas, Ecosystems of Excess (2014), or the futuristic museum Plastikus Progressus (2017) by Bonita Ely, subvert the temporal logic of waste as primarily a trace of the past and focus on futural forms of becoming-plastic. Ecosystem of Excess speculates on futural life forms without humankind. Rather than dealing with the contemporaneity of plastic waste and its troublesome presence, Yoldas offers a kind of escapist, colourful utopia of the future accessible only if deprived of current forms and beings. On the other hand, Bonita Ely proposes a multimedia recycling of the already existing proliferation of plastic objects into different entities, demanding separate taxonomies. If Yoldas escapes the problem of plastic waste, Ely deals with it by enforcing the effectiveness of recycling. Still, both are oriented towards imagining the future outside the domain of current coordinates. Such artistic responses to the abundance of waste reorient the experience of temporality from human-oriented discourses of crisis into speculations on the plasticised world, in which embracing human plasticity can mean cultivating an openness to the material vitality of plastic, and therefore, transformation of human subjectivity even to the point of its complete annihilation.