Dark Alchemy: How Plastic took us to a horror ride through the Capitalocene
Excerpt from Roland Barthes' text on plastic It was 60 years ago that Roland Barthes heralded the expanded use of plastic as a magic moment par excellence. The cheap, transmutable material captured the imagination of those pushing boundaries in the heroic days of the modernist era. Barthes reached out to the commonplaceness of the debased by the bourgeoisie material as a metaphor that suited a fight against exclusion. Uncannily versatile, plastic was spread to the point of being practically unseen. This was democratic magic, the everyday access to a corpus Hermeticorum, to science and its amazing possibilities. CUT to the 21st century [and I would suggest that Rolling Stones music enters for the dive into how modernity’s promise for clean accessibility and abundance rotted] Chris Jordan’s photographic series “ Midway: Message from the Gyre ” captured in 2009 the indestructible plastics that outlived the carcasses of the albatross that had digested them. In