Iconoplast

Our own role in evolution is transient and expendable in the context of the rich layer of interliving beings forming the planet’s surface. We may pollute the air and waters for our grandchildren and hasten pur own demise, but this will exert no effect on the continuation of the microcosm. (…) after we die we return to our forgotten stomping ground. The life forms that recycle the substance of our bodies are primarily bacteria. The microcosm is still evolving around us and within us. The microcosm is evolving as us. — Margulis, Lynn and Sagan, Dorion. Microcosmos. Four billion years of Microbial evolution, University of California Press, 1997

This work is a contribution to a bigger project, ICONOPLAST, that was planned to debut this fall, but cancelled because of the Covid outbreak. The pandemic had an impact on the script development, in particular specific readings, which inspired a cli-fi mockumentary. The idea that symbiosis, the living together and sometimes merging of different species of organisms, is crucial to the evolution of life forms on Earth, is the underpinning concept of this work.

The bigger project in which the work is inscribed is related to plastic, its transformative reuse and more broadly its acritical pervasive consumption, as pollutant that is omnipresent in our lives. I created every set and props with domestic upcycled commodity plastics I gathered, creating a sort of inventory, per types of polymers (PET, PP, HDPE, PP etc.) but also according to more artistic categories, mainly texture, patterns, versatility and colors.

One of the readings, The Earth after us, by Jan Zalasiewicz, inspired to set the script in a posthuman dimension where plastic debris will become petroleum again, broken down by bacteria, that will digest it and grow in symbiosis with it. I created a world of bacteria melting plastic and molding it with a DIY injector. I drew sections of their cell, inspired by scientific models, but transfiguring them in hybrid organisms, between fiction and reality.

I often play with time dimensions and for this work I intertwined past and future through a detournement of a scientific publication, a book of deep ecology focusing on the contribution of the microbial world on the evolution of life, Microcosmos, by Margulis and Sagan, who called into question the foundations of Darwinism with their version of the past four billions year of non-linear microbial evolution. I chose a few extracts for the voiceover but setting them in the future, simply by changing the verb, from past to future tense. With this chiasm, this misplacement, I want to talk about mutualism and symbiosis, in a transformational watery environment, but at the same time describing a plastisphere of technofossils and plastic particles, of petrified remains of a lost civilisation.
To bypass the rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism, I try to avoid binary narratives, pursuing an ethical endeavor that involves others, nonhuman beings, to talk to and about humans.