Joon. Plastic footprints

Espai Transversal

The Marxist psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles proposed displacing thought towards the feet because when we walk through the world it is essential to know where we are treading. Feet allow a territory to be read and leave their prints in it. But what happens if the footprint that you leave is not of human proportions but of hyper-consumption on a global scale?

Walking always leaves a trace and, at the same time, displacement constructs space. That footprint stamps its own identity (weight, position of the body, etc.). but the marks of singularity fade when the prints take on the figure of what we consume rather than what we create.

In 1860, John Hyatt invented celluloid, and since then plastic has been conquering the planet – a material that is at the same time essential and unnecessary, vital and deadly. Today, some 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year, and half of this is for single use, while less than 10% is recycled.

The acute global ecological crisis is not limited to environmental, ecocentric, or biocentric solutions that reproduce the tension between society and nature. An ecosophical thinking – such as that proposed by the philosopher Félix Guattari – points to a multifaceted movement that involves the political, the social, the artistic, the environmental, and the production of subjectivity.

These ideas are expressed in the work of Joon, with an installation composed of various elements that weave a particular connection between plastic and nature, favouring the interrelationship of the pieces more than individual objects.

Huellas plásticas [Plastic footprints] spurns narrative to become the evocation of a passage across the Earth. And as each step demands that we pay attention to the ground, the dispute over the symbolic value of the gaze in the space of art here loses its supremacy.

The installation forces the direction of the gaze to ask us how we see and whether we can perceive our own existence in the space and between the works. Basically, it is an invitation to practice the space so that a change of perspective can take place.