Plastic Passages

With support from the British Council, we tracked the movement of plastic along La Union’s waterways and collaborated with the artist Mandy Barker for her new work, entitled ‘DIP Sea KISS,’ part of a larger body of work about marine plastic debris.

Through an in depth photography workshop, we staged a conversation between the Global North and South, around our experiences being caught in the climate change struggle.

We gathered marine plastic debris in the form of single-use sachets from our waterways, to send to artist Mandy Barker, for the production of an artwork that is the artist’s first foray into interrogating Philippine waste culture versus global plastic production.
We designed the project around an intensive photography workshop comprised of eight students from varying backgrounds: photojournalists, conceptual photographers, and even a science researcher. The workshop, headed by Barker and Morales, was our way of equipping other storytellers with the practical knowledge and conceptual rigor needed to tell a multi-dimensional story that includes other issues constellating around plastic and waste culture.
The work of our workshop students will be exhibited in San Juan, La Union this year, alongside Mandy Barker’s creation, and will offer a nuanced look into the global problem of plastic waste, with perspectives from both members of the Global North, and South.

Plastic Passages Workshop

Local Stories, Global Problem

We designed an intensive, weeklong photography workshop comprised of eight students from diverse backgrounds around the Philippines: photojournalists, a university professor, conceptual photographers, and even a science researcher. The workshop, headed by photographers Mandy Barker and Hannah Reyes Morales, was our way of equipping other storytellers with the practical knowledge and conceptual rigor needed to tell a story that goes beyond the cliched understanding of an issue like plastic pollution. We wanted to help our students open their gazes so they could capture a deeper, more holistic picture of the daily life and culture of our coastal communities.

Over the next seven days of our program, we discovered that the workshop was becoming an exchange of insights that went far beyond our initial question. Though our students took on a range of issues relating to our waterways, approaching their stories in different ways, they each refracted the singular experience of living on these islands: surrounded and inundated by water, reckoning with a twice-colonised past, and caught in the climate struggle between the Global North and South.

In other words, the Plastic Passages workshop became a conversation about what it means to call the Philippine islands home. Jazmin had an important conversation with her mother about the period shaming that prevails in our country; Aia reckoned with the plastic packaging from her pandemic shopping habit; Geela explored the flickering fluorescent ukay-ukay shops where the excess of the world’s fashion ends up. Racelle was shocked to discover in her hometown in Eastern Samar a community of migrant fisherfolk she never knew existed, but couldn’t photograph for a few days, as Guiuan was hit by another typhoon. Meanwhile, Arturo photographed how plastic waste from surfboards wind up in the ocean, while Jomar traversed the length of the Pasig River, trying to listen to its voice amidst the din of the city. Our students’ points of views varied as much as their experiences: Jed imagined the microplastic in the air that we breathe as, in the words of Katy Perry, “a plastic bag, floating on the wind,” whereas Yuri saw the face of an insatiable monster in her swirly experimentations with plastic debris from Manila Bay—it spoke to her of the oil spills that have devastated our archipelago’s incredible marine biodiversity.

In responding to the plastic clogging our canals, leaking into our rivers, filling up our lakes, and spilling out to our seas, an even more essential, more complete picture dawned upon our senses: the bodies of water that are all around us. In truth, our relationship with these waters tells a most fundamental story about our community, its place in the greater ecology of these lands, and the future of our island nation.

Special thanks to our participants Jomar Tingson, Arturo Dedace III, Geela Garcia, Yuri Tan, Jed Daya, Ailah Solis, and Racelle Rescordado. Their work appears below.