Queer Life in the Plastisphere
Pınar Yoldaş, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
Plastic waste in the ocean is one of the biggest challenges of our time and is detrimental to the lives of many species, including humans. But this ecological disaster also offers unexpected new modes of being. How can plastic in the ocean be something life-affirming and queer?
Pınar Yoldaş, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
An Ecosystem of Excess is an art project from 2014 by Turkish artist and researcher Pınar Yoldaş. It showcased a collection of organisms from an imagined future where marine life has adapted to plastic waste in the ocean and now feed from it. The starting point of the project is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a large accumulation of plastic debris in the North Pacific Ocean, and the recent discovery of the plastisphere – an ecosystem of microbes documented to metabolize the plastic they live on. Seeing that the ocean is the cradle for all life on Earth, Yoldaş asks what life forms might emerge from this plastic soup if life started there today.
The artist describes her work as a “natural history museum of the future.” In glass containers she has displayed alien-looking organs that allow the plastivores (the plastic eating creatures), to sense, digest, and filter plastics. Beside them are pelagic insects that live in the surface layer of the open ocean and now thrive among the plastic waste, and coloured feathers of sea birds that have been dyed Coca-Cola-red and Evian-pink from ingesting of bottle caps. There are also colour-changing eggs from a marine reptilian to be found on a white plastic beach, and a plastic balloon sea turtle that has grown inflatable lumps on top of its shell from eating balloons – its favourite type of plastic. Lastly, an electrical mixer containing plastic soup serves as the backdrop for the new ecosystem, while echoing the Pacific trash vortex that is the origin of the plastic creatures.
While plastic waste in nature is harmful to many animals, microplastics and nanoplastics are the forms of plastic that are the most toxic to humans. Plastic is a problematic pollutant since it does not biodegrade and has a virtually indefinite lifespan. It can photodegrade from sun exposure but is only broken down into minuscule pieces that mix with other matter. No place on Earth is untouched by these plastic fragments, and they have been found in places as remote as Antarctica. Microplastics can also be found inside most people’s bodies and are mainly ingested through contaminated food. The danger in consuming plastics lies for the most part in the chemicals they often contain that are added to give qualities like heat-resistance, pliability, and colour. The many negative health effects associated with these chemicals include infertility, miscarriages, and feminization of male fetuses. The latter is often credited to BPA (Bisphenol A) which can mimic estrogen and disrupt the body’s hormonal balance. One study shows that exposure to this chemical during pregnancy may lead to physical as well as behavioural changes in male children. The subjects included in the survey were less inclined to stereotypical boy play, like playing with toy-guns, and preferred gender-neutral activities like puzzles.
Pınar Yoldaş, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
Pınar Yoldaş, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
If we understand queer as a term that refers to being outside of the heteronormative – as having a body that is different, or not engaging in a heterosexual and procreative coupling as expected by society – it can be argued that plastics are queering our bodies by inhibiting our ability to reproduce and by subverting sexual difference in human bodies. Since plastic is proven to inhibit fertility, Heather Davis suggests that plastic “… is heralding in a future in which – regardless of one’s gender, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs – reproduction is increasingly decoupled from sex.” While it can be argued that the separation of sex and procreation is further queering human lives, it may also encourage compassion beyond the survival of our own genetics. In a conceivable future where our successors are non-human, it allows us to establish kinships that are not strictly survivalist. This is at the core of An Ecosystem of Excess, where plastic – the last remnant of humanity – has fused with biological life. It is a testament to the queerness of biological life with its diffuse borders and ability to forge new connections. In the plastisphere this transformation is already happening, so perhaps we should accept plastic as the human contribution to the future ecosystems of the planet.
Pınar Yoldaş, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
Though the word “excess” in Yoldaş’ project certainly speaks to the excessive consumption of plastic that has created the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, it is simultaneously meant to illustrate the excesses of nature. Elizabeth Grosz writes that there is a natural overproduction of biological life found in nature, and that this “… energetic excess is the condition for the production of biological and cultural extravagance, the uncontainable production of intensification, not for the sake of the skills of survival but simply because of its force of bodily intensification.” She traces the products of human society and culture back to this intensification which is beyond survival and reproduction, and in this light, plastic can be seen as a product of nature’s excess. An Ecosystem of Excess shows the plastic creatures not simply surviving off of plastic, but thriving, with vibrant colours visible in the plastic-coloured bird feathers, and inventive uses of plastic like the plastic balloon turtle that uses its inflatable lumps not only as a flotation device, but also to attract partners. Central to queer ecology is to find joy in the excess of nature and to bring attention to sites where biodiversity is being eradicated, which has been happening, and continues to happen in the ocean.
Pınar Yoldaş, An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
Bibliography
Davis, Heather. “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures.” philoSOPHIA 5, nr. 2 (2015): 231-250.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
Liboiron, Max. “Plasticizers: A Twenty-first-century Miasma.” In Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic, edited by Jennifer Gabrys, Gay Hawkins, and Mike Michael, 134-150. London: Routledge, 2013.
Pangburn, DJ. “Pinar Yoldas Imagines Future Life Inside the Pacific Trash Vortex.” Vice. January 21, 2014. https://www.vice.com/en/article/ez5dgn/pinar-yoldas-imagines-future-life-inside-the-pacific-trash-vortex
Yoldas, Pinar. “Ecosystem of Excess, 2014.” Accessed April 10, 2021. https://www.pinaryoldas.info/Ecosystem-of-Excess-2014