Post-micro-plastic
- On my way to Istanbul Airport, I saw Su Canavarı [Water Monster] taking a bath in a very small pot of water. The water looks like the remains of a wetland, a river, rain, a cloud,1 or maybe just an accumulation of liquid of unknown origin.2 Its smile looks like a fresh watercolor miniature. I guess it is still comfortable to hang out around this city,3 even if “they” control it.
- The scale, the volume, the form:4 the visual representation of water and its creatures in art history is massive. The old masters have a lot of fun adding monsters that inhabit the seas and oceans of maps around the so-called New World. Considering the current context of pollution,5 here is another interpretation: those ancient monsters are the siblings of the contemporary microplastics, and the maps are now our bodies where they roar and devour our remains.
- Hopefully, I could escape from pollution, but it looks impossible... şey... tea bags also disseminate microplastics in the teapot, right? Now, I keep imagining a lot of monsters swimming in my cup.
Eduardo Cruces, Su Canavarı [Water Monster], 2023
Oil painting on pressed canvas, with mucilage image downloaded from Google
Oil painting on pressed canvas, with mucilage image downloaded from Google
1 Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.
2 James C. Scott, “Wetlands and Sedentism,” Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017, pp. 35-45.
3 Rod Giblett, Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
4 Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2015, pp. 247-264. Accessed: 02.12.2025, doi.org.
5 Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021.