Plastic-free Biennale

“Plastic-free Biennale is a strange beast! We have been commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney to facilitate its desire ’to go plastic-free’. As anyone living in the world in 2020 would recognise, this is nigh-on-impossible to achieve. So, how can we as artists work in this space where good intentions butt up against our inevitable failure? First, we acknowledge that we ourselves don’t have any special insights about how to go plastic-free. In our everyday lives’ plastic is all around us! It’s so useful that we cannot really imagine living without it. And yet every day, overwhelming waves of media wash up tales of gigantic plastic gyres in the ocean, plastic microparticles in our food, plastic in our soil and plastic choking seabirds to death. And where would the art world be without plastic? Without bubble-wrap, how can we safely transport precious artworks? Without vinyl decals, how can we create professional-looking signage? Without acrylic paint, how can we make our white cubes look clean and of museum standard? Plastic is so useful, and so dangerous. What would a genuinely plastic-free Biennale look like?”

For this wide-ranging socially engaged project, Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams began with the Biennale of Sydney itself, engaging staff in discussions and field trips while also looking at the organisation’s environmental management more broadly. On Cockatoo Island, the artists have been working with one of the main food and beverage caterers, Societé Overboard. In their home of Wollongong, they’ve engaged local kids and Wadi Wadi Elder Aunty Barbara Nicholson to create a new plastic-themed song. For this present iteration, the artists have created a space for gathering and discussion, centred around the old-fashioned activity of washing up, as both metaphor and action for taking responsibility, allowing people to bring re-usable containers rather than buying disposable items. To delve into all aspects of the project, visit the artists project blog: plasticfreebiennale.sydney