Message in a Bottle - 2019 Oslo Triennale

MESSAGES

# the plastisphere

# material economies

# the limits of growth

# what does a bottle want to be?

#01. “Waste is just a resource in the wrong hands,” Oliver Waddington-Ball

#02. “Degrowth advocates a contraction of economies by reducing production and consumption,” Giorgos Kallis

#03. “Reducing production and consumption does not equate reducing prosperity or wellbeing,” Giorgos Kallis

#04. “We can stop worrying about biodegrading plastics; we will want our plastic containers to last as long as possible,” TNcitizen

#05. “An empty container can have value; it not need be something that requires us to expand landfills,” TNcitizen

#06. “Degrowth is a rejection of the illusion of growth,” Giacomo D'Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgios Kallis

#07. “Land, water, and garbage are moving about the earth’s surface in biblical proportions,” Meredith Miller.

#08. “A plastiglomerate is an emergent prod¬uct of human and geological processes,” Meredith Miller.

#09. “Plastiglomerates are likely to remain on the earth’s surface far beyond the human race,” Meredith Miller.

#10. “Infinite growth is impossible,” OAT curators.

#11. “Addressing climate change can be both affordable and local,” William D. Nordhaus.

#12. “We must imagine alternative societal structures that do not incentivize unsustainable resource and energy use,” OAT curators.

#13. “What materials and technologies will be used when we can no longer afford value engineering?” OAT curators.

#14. “What can architecture be when buildings are no longer instruments of financial accumulation?” OAT curators.

#15. “What is mostly sustainable is something that lasts,” David Sellers.

#16. “A problem cannot be solved by the same level of thinking as caused it,” Albert Einstein

#17. “The modern world and its systems at one level seem stable and secure, but are in fact very precarious,” Peter Buchanan.

#18. “Devastating environmental problems can be seen as marking the terminal phases an era,” Peter Buchanan.

#19. “Drinking water is healthy, but disposable water bottles contain chemicals that have been linked to reproductive issues, asthma and dizziness,” Greener Ideal Staff.

#20. “Garbage forces us to look deeper into the geochemical affinities between capital and excrement,” Lydia Kallipoliti.

#21. “Why does a used bottle need to lie lifeless like a carcass?” Lydia Kallipoliti

#22. “The power of capitalism seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Power, nevertheless, can be resisted and changed by humans,” Ursula Le Guin.

#23. “Plas¬tiglomerates are physical markers of climate’s ongoing transformation,” Meredith Miller.

#24. “No part of the world remains unaffected by the cumulative impact of human activity,” Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis

#25. “One person’s trash basket is another person’s living space,” US National Academy of Science.

#26. “Each of the 7 billion humans on the planet produces 35 kgr of plastic annually, approximating the total human biomass,” Erik R. Zettler, Tracy J. Mincer, Linda A. Amaral-Zettler.

#27. “Each year, the earth’s surface is populated with new plastic whose combined bulk is roughly equivalent to that of all the human bodies,” Meredith Miller.

#28. “Garbage housing is not an original idea,” Martin Pawley.

#29. “The environmental and sociopolitical crisis is no longer a cut in the normal — it is the new normal,” Nicholas Korody.

#30. “If crisis has become commonplace, then perhaps architects too should turn to the commonplace. And what is more common than a plastic water bottle produced at vast scales?” Nicholas Korody.

#31. “Analyzing and mapping existing circuits of capital and commodities, points and places can be discovered where the insertion of a simple design product — a 1-inch plastic joint, for example — could have enormous potential,” Nicholas Korody.

#32. “Against this residue, no economic industrial retrieval program has prevailed,” Martin Pawley.

#33. “Any attempt to introduce a new strategy for secondary use must come from the inside of mass consumption itself,” Martin Pawley.

#34. “What if things can really hail us?” Jane Bennet.

#35. “Nothing would be discarded; nothing lost,” Song Dong.

#36. “Hoarding is the madness appropriate to a political economy devoted to over-consumption and planned obsolescence,” Jairus Grove.

#37. “The Pacific Gyre is a creation of the conjoined actions of water currents, capitalist accumulation, a fervent ideology of economic growth and free markets, and the trillions of plastic bags, toys and bottles that that humans discard daily,” Jane Bennet.

#38. “The plastic soup is a product, or rather a by-product, of social reality,” Lydia Kallipoliti.

#39. “New material relationships between plastics and birds now influence design decisions,” Rhett Russo, Andreas Theodoridis, Lydia Kallipoliti.

#40. What if a bottle had a long and important life after you drink the contents?” Friendship Bottles LLC

#41. “Can you even imagine our world without plastic?” Andreas Theodoridis

#42. What if a bottle never ends up in the ocean?” Friendship Bottles LLC

#43. “Bird biodiversity is now linked to the life of plastics,” Rhett Russo, Andreas Theodoridis, Lydia Kallipoliti.

#44. “We need to consider alternative practices where materials exist only in phases and have multiple lives,” Rhett Russo, Andreas Theodoridis, Lydia Kallipoliti.

#45. “The material ramifications of preserving growth only serves the growth of capital itself,” Lydia Kallipoliti.

#46. “We developed an interlocking bottle to be used as a building material; it would never be thrown away,” Friendship Bottles LLC

#47. “The WOBO bottle is a brick that holds beer,” John Habraken

#48. “Bottles are the natural resources of modern humanity,” Mike Reynolds.

#49. “There is no such thing as away. When you throw something away, it must go somewhere,” Annie Leonard.

#50. “Solid wastes are the discarded leftovers of our advanced consumer society,” Jimmy Carter.

#51. “Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting,” Buckminster Fuller

#52. “Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war,” Naomi Klein.

#53. “What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources,” Naomi Klein.

#54. “Our future was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once,” Greta Thunberg.

#55. “Reducing carbon emissions requires reducing material use,” Ernst Worrell and Jesus Rosales Carreon

#56. “Efficiency improvements lead to more, not less, resource use,” Society for Ecological Economics

#57. “A retrofitting, renewable economy is desirable environmentally,” Giorgos Kallis

#58. “We constructed a pavilion from 53,780 recycled bottles, the number thrown away in New York City every hour,” Studio KCA.

#59. “What will we do with our own trash now that China stopped importing waste from around the world?” IaaC Metabolic Cities

#60. “If you spread all plastic waste equally, ankle-deep, it would cover an area the size of Argentina,” Roland Geyer