PEPVCPTFEPEG — Reflections and links based on two seminars and a research trip, dealing with slow violence

The exhibition PEPVCPTFEPEG at uqbar and Kronenboden is the result of a collective research process by students of the HfG Karlsruhe from the Media Art (Artistic Photography) department under the direction of Professor Susanne Kriemann. The works presented here, are to be seen as reflections on the pending task of finding apt methods for a documentation of the long-term effects of ‘slow violence’—and our own entanglement.

In the manner of a chemical compound, PEPVCPTFEPEG, combines the polymer structures of PE, PVC, PTFE, PEG to one monstrous string of various plastics. In current debate, the discussion focuses on the long-term effects of microplastics, that is on the small particles into which plastic disaggregates. Plastics, as (semi-)synthetic organic compounds were originally developed because of their ‘plasticity.’ They are specifically malleable and can be molded into almost any possible object. Yet, this is also the reason that plastic is a very unstable material—plastic lives. Exposed to the weather, and especially in the open ocean, it breaks down quickly into ‘mermaid tears.’ The term captures the dilemma of the situation of finding millions of these colorful, small pearls on the beaches.

It is the hardly visible and long-term effects on the ecosystem of such processes as microplastics that Rob Nixon subsumes under the term of ‘slow violence.’ Only rather recently, microplastics has surfaced in the public, but quickly has become a much-debated concern. In two seminars of the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe (HfG), as well as on a research trip to Sri Lanka, led by Prof. Susanne Kriemann and Friederike Schäfer, a group of students developed process-based works for recording these issues. They analyzed and documented moments of ‘slow violence’ in the landscapes of the South Asian island, while taking into consideration their own relations and actions to plastics on their very daily routines. In their research, they furthermore discovered that plastic not only breaks down, poisoning our water and the living beings that depend on it, but that it is also the basis for new hybrid-forms that develop in and with the plastic—it lives.