SEBASTIEN
KOHLER
PHOTOGRAPHY
By Sébastien Kohler and Sébastien Théraulaz
We see a dreamlike city, with futuristic architecture, that is wrapped in a mysterious halo.This is Plasticity, the capital of a continent born from petrochemical chaos.
It is a malleable, floating megalopolis that is forever expanding but remains a dark and unpeopled place, a strange staging ground for the billions of tons of artifacts we have manufactured, consumed and discarded over many decades. Cast adrift in the oceans, they swirl and accumulate into a single monstrous city in the middle of the oceans.
We, the humans, are dispersed unevenly across six continents, in clusters that occupy less than 2% of the land hemisphere—which land accounts, in turn, for only a third of the earth's surface. Our plastic trash, which cannot dissolve in the environment, has ended up in the sea. Out of sight, out of mind, it floats freely with the waves, then is condensed by swirling ocean currents into a new, artificial land mass: the Seventh Continent.
This is a continent of anthropogenic waste, and Plasticity is its imaginary capital. The continent has, according to scientific estimates, a surface area roughly equal to one-sixth of the United States. But it remains invisible and uninhabited—and deadly, because this pollution kills the marine fauna who blindly swallow the free-floating particles of plastic as if they were food.
Our artistic project is to make this lethal seventh continent visible. To incorporate it for our consciences. To give it a material form that we cannot imagine away.