Plastic Bang! Kok

In Love We Trash / Installation
Bangkok, Thailand
2012
Plastic bags.

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According to Bangkok Metropolitan Administration  every day more than 600,000 plastic bags are used in Bangkok (a city with over 9 million inhabitants). Most of this bags become a residue in an approximately time that goes between 12 to 20 minutes. According to city officials, its annual disposal costs more than 600 million baht (18.5 million dollars).

Plastic Bang! Kok project used plastic bags, a daily symbol of harmless hyperconsumption, as the smallest singularity from which explode and expand.

Plastic bags as the only raw material for building an urban scale  intervention that brings us closer to the duality CONSUMPTION / WASTE and its social and environmental impact.

Display  this garbage from under the sink into an urban scale intervention, because with no coincidences it has itself an urban scale! How many football fields occupy the dumping sites in the peripheries of cities?

Some monsters feed themselves on fear, ours -as in Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away- grew as the consumption of plastic bags get bigger.

To visualize the mass and daily use of plastic bags and become aware of their  implications, we built an inflatable Monster Garden, fragile, tender, scary, maybe, but with the disturbing point of  things you know should not be where they are.

During the project we worked with two bundles of 60 kilos bags filled directly from the landfill. The profile of the bags reflect the consumption patterns of the city 1/3 of the stock was up to color bags from shops consumption, ⅓ of white and transparent bags from supermarkets and plastic wraps and ⅓ of black trash bags. These percentages and the particular characteristics of these bags were reflected in the size and appearance of each of the monsters built.

The work was carried out at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (BACC). During four days we washed, perfumed, repair, put them a sunday dress …We have spent a lot of time taking care of the plastic bags, healing them, learning to value them and reuse them.