Does anyone else remember a 1997 “Plastics Make It Possible” commercial? In a 30-second TV spot, a series of tweens narrate various ways that plastics are helpful: A child on rollerblades notes that plastics in his kneepads saved his patella; a kid who looks vaguely like Jonathan Taylor Thomas is stoked that plastic keeps his soda safe. Another child floats through the air holding a bright orange plastic bag. It ends with a little girl thanking plastics for saving her police–officer dad’s life with a bullet-proof vest. Sort of a dark turn, but you get it. Plastics, they make it possible.
But plastics also make us sick: Every “life cyle” step of plastic—from its production, refinement, and distribution to its disposal—creates hazards that are toxic to the environment and to human bodies. Unfortunately, the material is cheap to produce, and according to author Matt Simon in his Wired story, “The Ohio Derailment Lays Bare the Hellish Plastic Crisis,” we’re producing it to the tune of a trillion pounds per year. And, he writes, “production could triple from 2016 levels by 2050, according to the World Economic Forum. By then, annual emissions from the industry will be the equivalent of 615 coal-fired power plants.” Heck, we’re even breathing plastics. Like most products and ideologies emanating from our petrochemical lifestyle, it’s a problem that extends across borders. 2023 Venice Biennale U.S. Pavilion curators Tizziana Baldenebro, executive director of the arts forum SPACES in Cleveland, and Lauren Leving,curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, are dedicating their forthcoming installation, titled Everlasting Plastics, to producing new types of knowledge and interpretations of how we live with (and die by) our styrene obsession.
Baldenebro and Leving are not strangers to plastic production and consumption: Both are based in Ohio, a state that ranks number one in the U.S. for plastics employment. They watched as the recent Norfolk Southern train derailment ended with the contents of 20 cars filled with vinyl chloride, an explosive chemical used to make PVC, dissolve into the landscape of East Palestine, Ohio. For Baldenebro and Leving, the culture of chemical refinement is their state’s economic engine, but they see the material in more expansive ways.
“It's really important to think about our material relationships; the ways in which architects and designers are suggesting ‘plastic’ futures using waste,” Leving says. Plastic futures go beyond the reduce/reuse/recycle practice, and instead offer possibilities for unfixed, imaginative conditions ahead.
“Plastics are here to stay; honestly, we don't know the lifespan of plastic. The relationship between plastic and plasticity, it can be used or formed in an infinite number of ways, so we're bringing in these innovative practitioners to think about their different perspectives, and how can that infinite number of ways become resources,” adds Leving.
The exhibition will include work by five practitioners working across architecture and design—Ang Li, Norman Teague, Xavi Aguirre, Lauren Yaeger, and Simon Anton—to directly or indirectly addresses material obsolescence and lifespans, circular resources, and sustainability. Baldenebro encountered all of their practices throughout her time in the Midwest: first as a grad student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she was taught by Li, and later, as she began her curatorial career at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
“I started developing this concept after doing a studio visit with [Aguirre] who was at University of Michigan; we had a lot of conversations about the aesthetics of plastic-core …the divorce that we have to have from these kind of hyper-smooth, hyper-finished qualities. Anton was also working a lot in Detroit, looking at waste systems and shredded waste, and reforming it into interesting sculptural designed works,” she says.
She met Yaeger when she moved to Cleveland to run SPACES; Yaeger’s work, which salvages materials, “hearkens to this idealistic Americana quality, where you're optimistic about these materials, but then you look closer, and you can see they're burnished, aged, and worn,” Baldenebro says. Teague also brings a different perspective in his designed objects: While he often works with wood, his practice focuses on sustainability through local economies.
“When we think about sustainability, one of the big critiques that comes from this Rust Belt region is that it's not sustainability of jobs. That's the big Red Scare button that happens in this region; if we talk about sustainability, it means a lot of job loss,” Baldenebro adds. “I was fascinated by the through lines of these practices, and thinking a lot about how [many] practitioners in the region are thinking about waste and refuse in these creative and interesting ways.”
The pavilion promises to bring a post-industrial feel, perhaps a comment on the Rust Belt ethos of making-do and repurposing the remains of lost greatness that define the region. After periods of mass production under ‘economic growth,’ and later, abandonment, we are left to manage the discarded refuse. It’s a challenge to plastic’s endless cyclical ethos of extraction, production, consumption, and disposal that characterizes our material relationship.
But, the duo doesn’t want to necessarily make a grinding value judgment, Leving says. In collaboration with Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, they have invited several outside authors, artists, and scholars writing texts that explore “our personal relationships to plastic that, from their perspective, are in line with their practice,” Leving says. Some, she continues, are writing from the perspective of the climate crisis, but others such as Sky Cubacub, founder of Rebirth Garments, a gender nonconforming wearables company in Chicago, see plastics as vital to their community.
“They’re thinking about the relationship between fashion and fat, queer, disabled bodies, and those individuals rely heavily on spandex,” Leving says. Spandex, like many other synthetic fibers, is primarily made up of polyurethane. “So spandex is not only life-saving but it's also gender affirming in ways that other materials just aren’t.”
There will certainly be more to come as each pavilion participant reveals their intended projects, but until then, Everlasting Plastics promises to be an exercise in creating complexity. I do revel in indictment—those "Plastics Make It Possible" ads are hellish and reductive, and that vaguely-Jonathan Taylor Thomas character’s 1997 soda bottle is currently on year 26 of the 450 years it takes for a plastic bottle to degrade. But beyond indictment, we can explore what it means to live with the ruin we’ve created, what we’ve manufactured, how much we’ve consumed, and how we might move forward.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
Read more from Anjulie Rao: At RISD, examining the past to celebrate design for all bodies. | Design education needs a dose of radical imagination. | Can the rust belt become the housing belt?
