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The artist and designer Bianca Carague (1995) enjoys immersing her audience in fictional worlds. She builds these worlds using videos, sculptures, installations, and games, and uses them to speculate about the future. She also invites spectators to critically reflect on power relations and contemporary technological challenges.
The project Maria Islands (2023-2024), part of which is shown at Prospects, examines global waste management. As western countries are unable or unwilling to process their huge quantities of waste themselves, they often choose to transfer the problem. Over the years, this has resulted in many tonnes of garbage being shipped to countries in South-east Asia. A fictional, plastic archipelago that is part of the Philippines and serves as the point of departure for Carague’s work. This archipelago was inspired by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: an accumulation of plastic waste in the North Pacific Ocean, that to a certain extend has become an island in its own right, roughly three times the size of France. What in reality is a huge pile of junk that threatens biodiversity, has become a thriving ecosystem in Maria Islands, with new animal and plant species that have adapted to living in this plastic environment. They are brought to life and protected by the techno god Maria.
In this way, Maria Islands is Carague’s response to the power dynamics of global waste management. What would happen if the Philippines were to turn these dynamics to their own advantage and use the dumped plastic waste to expand their territory?
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)