Wayfinding Through Waste: A Collective, Living Archive of Coastal Plastic

Abstract

Through the transdisciplinary lens of feminist materialism, this research uses counter-archiving to reconsider human-plastic relations and find new ways to live-with the ubiquity of plastic marine debris. Emerging from my solitary practice of beachcombing as an embodied research-creation method, I sought to transform plastic waste into unique artifacts. Through two participatory gallery installations, participants were asked to respond to a series of open-ended, affect-driven prompts encouraging a deeper curiosity towards these artifacts, and in turn they contributed to a collective ‘living’ archive of marine plastic. A responsive postfoundational framework was employed, resulting in a new form of inquiry I refer to as ‘speculative narrativization’. This unconventional methodology led to a collaborative re-storying of each artifact and the emergence of previously unpercieved meaning. This thesis advocates for the use of affective participatory counter-archiving to re-examine our entangled relationship with plastic pollution and proposes the potential adaptation of this model within environmentalism, citizen-science and other cross-disciplinary contexts.