Everlasting Plastics

How can we live without plastics? But, also, how can we live without plastics? These two questions, which index a different set of urgent concerns, haunt Everlasting Plastics. Exploring the infinite ways in which plastics permeate our bodies and our world, the book offers intimate and political accounts of our fraught yet enmeshed kinship with these materials.

Rather than making a case for or against the material, the writings and artworks collected in this volume attempt to register our ongoing toxic dependencies on plastic, its impact on other material cultures and behaviors, and the harm and possibilities it entangles for our collective futures.Everlasting Plastics records and expands upon the exhibition of the US Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale, which excavated the ways synthetics both shape and erode contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment.

Refusing to see the exhibition as a static event and instead imagining it as an invitation to evolve the stakes of a shared conversation, the book gathers the work of the exhibition alongside research, reflections, sketches, and newly commissioned critical essays. More than a catalog, Everlasting Plastics is itself an exercise in plasticity-staging interactions between institutions and disciplines, between editorial and curatorial practice, between book and exhibition. Through its range of formats, the book unfolds, broadens, revises, and expands the histories, relations, preoccupations, and discourses on and around our relationship to plastic matter and thought.