Agnese Forlani

Wrap it up, please is a research project initiated from some pieces of plastic I had at hand and the many questions around them.

I collected and patiently sewed together pieces of material as I did with pieces of its histories, artifacts and artworks, analytic and poetic texts, movies and advertisements, in the attempt of better understanding the ways plastic appears to me and to others, the functions it carries and the stories it tells.

Treating Plastic as a powerful coagent in relation to me, other human and non-human bodies, I paid particular attention at how its material presence woven in so many levels with the fabric of present reality reveals meaningful truths about me as human and my relationship to materiality.

Traversing ecological concerns and capitalistic mindsets to then open into broader queries about naturality and artificiality, image and substance, matter and meaning.

I played with the scale of questions as I did with the distance of approaches: from scavenging material to reading philosophical academic texts, from crafting costumes and scenography to imagining fictional scenarios for characters to live in, in order to bring about a story in which the personal and the collective inevitably collide. Ultimately plastic can tell me something more about power and control, the nostalgia and despair of my humanity and its desire to shape, perfect and master material reality.