Sketches on Everlasting Plastics: Book Talk and Reception

Please join Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC) to mark the release of Sketches on Everlasting Plastics, an editorial intervention and ongoing collaboration with the curators of the US Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2023 Venice Biennale. The event takes place on the occasion of the opening of the United States Pavilion’s exhibition Everlasting Plastics organized by SPACES, a nonprofit alternative art organization based in Cleveland, OH­.

Please RSVP to confirm your attendance.

CBAC editors—Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph, and assistant editor Meriam Soltan—will be joined in conversation by the 2023 US Pavilion Co-Curators Tizziana Baldenebro and Lauren Leving, and Assistant Curator Paula Volpato; graphic designers Lucas Reif and Renata Graw of Normal Studio; contributor Stephanie Ginese; Associate Curator Theodossis Issaias and Curatorial Fellow Ala Tannir of the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art; and Rania Ghosn of Design Earth.

Sketches on Everlasting Plastics will accompany the Everlasting Plastics exhibition to unfold a discursive map of the histories, urgencies, relations, and preoccupations attendant to the show. Sketches explores the infinite ways in which plastic permeates our bodies and our world. Rather than making a case for or against the material, the project offers intimate and political accounts of our fraught relationships with plastic, its impact on material cultures, and the harm and possibilities it entangles for our collective futures.

As the title implies, Sketches stages an interaction: between institutions, between disciplines, between editorial and curatorial practice, between book and exhibition. The project leans into sketching as a methodology for broadening, revising, pushing the discourse on and around the exhibition Everlasting Plastics and our engagement with plastic matter and thought—refusing the exhibition as a static event and rather seeing it as an invitation to evolve the stakes of a shared conversation. In doing so, it also begins to form a working epistemology of plastic.

Sketches on Everlasting Plastics consists of contributions by Tizziana Baldenebro, Kristen Bos, K. Jake Chakasim, Sky Cubacub, Heather Davis, Jennifer Gabrys, Stephanie Ginese, Aurelia Guo, Adam Hanieh, Ilana Harris-Babou, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Carolyn L. Kane, Laleh Khalili, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Esther Leslie, Lauren Leving, Ani Liu, Adie Mitchell, Timothy Mitchell, Gabrielle Printz, Kyla Schuller, Terry Schwarz, Pallavi Sen, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, and RA Washington.