hyperAbject
photo-video-performance installation: textures of waste
THERE IS NO AWAY
“the hyperabject can be defined as a planetary infrastructure of waste.
what defines the hyperabject is not only extension but inertness and the clogging of economic and ecological circulations produced by this inertness.
hyperabject not only has no agency but is nothing but lack of agency – the dumbness of the decommissioned ship, the eternity of a scrap of plastic”
[ Frantzen, Mikkel Krause; Bjering, Jens 2020. Ecology, capitalism and waste: From hyperobject to hyperabject.
Theory, Culture & Society 37(6): 87–109 ]
"The hyperabject is the limit case of capitalist animism, a ‘dead’ object in a world of vivified objects (...). The operations and axioms of capitalist animism demand instant re-animation and re-integration through the gift of vivification, but against the hyperabject the magician’s wand is powerless: life will not come to these parts, not even as the ‘zombie’, the ‘spectral’, or the ‘undead’. The hyperabject is like a noble gas – it reacts with nothing, but it is not, as object-oriented ontologists perhaps would phrase it, ‘withdrawn’. What makes the hyperabject stand out is its inertness and nothing else."
[ Frantzen, Mikkel Krause; Bjering, Jens 2020. Ecology, capitalism and waste: From hyperobject to hyperabject.
Theory, Culture & Society 37(6): 87–109 ]
the notion of the <hyperabject> was coined by Danish eco-poet Theis Ørntoft and developed into a theoretical concept by Mikkel Krause Frantzen. The term is a synthesis of Timothy Morton's concept of hyperobjects and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection.
there’s waste at the bottom of the sea, on mountain slopes, on islands in the middle of the oceans and inside my blood cells. I have become… I am! waste! when did I decide I wanted this kind of intimacy?!
" The place of the abject is where meaning collapses, the place where I am not. The abject threatens life, it must be radically excluded from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self "
[ Barbara Creed ]
the hyperabject fends off absorption or any attempt at circularity.
the impossibility of decomposition.
<hyperAbject> documents & immerses into textures of various plastic waste fragments, using field photography from illegal landfills around Bucharest, shot in November 2023 for the project ”There is NO away!”
Credits:
Photography, animation & performance: gcv
Research & video assistant: kiro
during the immersive event held at MNȚRplusC gallery in Bucharest, visitors were able to interact with the animation using a mini digital microscope to juxtapose zoomed-in textures of the performer's/ their own skin tissues onto the trash textures.
the new atlas of cells: living - dead - immortal.
”There is NO away!” is a cultural intervention project coordinated by Plastic Art Performance collective/ Macaia Association and co-financed by AFCN (Administration of National Cultural Fund)
