THESE SEASONS | SKETCHES ON EVERLASTING PLASTICS

These Seasons | Sketches on Everlasting Plastics with Heather Davis, Gabrielle Printz, and Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is a GSAPP recommended event organized by the Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York.

For the sixth installment of These Seasons, the Swiss Institute will host a collective reading and conversation around Sketches on Everlasting Plastics. Sketches explores the infinite ways in which plastic permeates our bodies and our world––offering intimate and political accounts of our fraught relationship with the material that register how plastic is at once life-giving and death-dealing. Grappling with the protracted inheritance (biological, territorial, spatial, geological) of our petrochemical world, the project accounts for the toxic residues, relationships, and beliefs attendant to over-consumption and -production that have and continue to extend and evolve across generations.

Sketches was produced as part of the United States Pavilion’s exhibition Everlasting Plastics at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The project stages an interaction: between institutions, between disciplines, between editorial and curatorial practice, between book and exhibition. Sketches leans into sketching as a methodology for broadening, revising, pushing the discourse on and around the exhibition Everlasting Plastics and our relationship to 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.

With introductions by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC) editors Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph, and Meriam Soltan and the 2023 US Pavilion Co-Curators Tizziana Baldenebro, Lauren Leving, and Assistant Curator Paula Volpato, the evening will feature readings from Heather Davis, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, and Gabrielle Printz, followed by a discussion.

Sketches on Everlasting Plastics is the first publication in an ongoing editorial collaboration between CBAC, New York and SPACES, Cleveland.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net and visit the Swiss Institute website for more information.