Moulting from Within<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThis plastic invasion of our bodies\u2014which could be termed a \u201csynthetic becoming\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - I borrow the expression from the title of the book Synthetic Becoming<\/em>, whose contributors explore the work of artists and authors interested in the new molecular patrimony that characterizes the contemporary crossbreeding of human bodies, the petrochemical industry, and the material state of our environment. See Lenka Vesel\u00e1, ed., Synthetic Becoming<\/em> (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2022).<\/span>\u2014lies at the very heart of the work of Dutch artist and designer Pleun Van Dijk. Her multidisciplinary projects Replika<\/em> (2018) and Reborn<\/em> (2016) both call on a speculative aesthetic, using the codes of science fiction and design to shape futurist works in which the human body is subjected to the processes of industrial production. In Replika<\/em>, two technicians work painstakingly at a tall metal table in a setting resembling a laboratory-cum-operating room. Piling up at their feet are silicone moulds, like empty wombs, disquietingly evoking the forms of babies. From these shells, through the performers\u2019 meticulous, repeated operations, twelve tiny humanoid creatures are born, each bearing, as production progresses, increasingly visible bodily deformations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Pleun-van-Dijk\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Pleun-van-Dijk_Replika_004-scaled.jpg\")
Pleun van Dijk<\/strong>
Replika<\/em>, performance view, Roskilde Festival, Danemark, 2018.
Photo: Nahmlos, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nBy taking the assembly-line techniques emblematic of the capitalist system and the technical equipment of the science laboratory as motifs, Replika<\/em> questions the disputable probity of the pharma-technological structures associated with normalizing bodies: neoliberal structures generated by the patriarchy that constantly force-feeds us\u2014at high prices\u2014synthetic hormones, make-up, and all kinds of implants in order to mould our bodies to conform to their arbitrary standards (of sex, gender, capacity, etc.). The ostentatious deformities of the Replika<\/em> babies are not necessarily being condemned; instead, they reflect the urgency of confronting the discomfort we may feel in the face of something that could\u2014or could not\u2014be considered \u201cabnormal\u201d or \u201cimpure\u201d in this era that is slowly becoming known as the Plastocene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\nIn Reborn<\/em>, Van Dijk uses silicone moulding to produce substitute \u201cskins,\u201d capable of mitigating bodily ageing or of replacing the epidermis following an injury, for example. A dystopian extension of plastic surgery, which aims at remodelling parts of the body affected by disease or trauma, Reborn<\/em> imagines a future in which, thanks to synthetic materials, it would literally be possible to switch skins\u2014a moulting that is already occurring within our bodies through the chemical substances that we ingest. Neomaterialist theorists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasize that this saturation of inorganic materials in the intimacy of our living bodies itself justifies the urgency of treating them no longer as passive surfaces but as agents contributing to a redefinition of the mutually exclusive categories of the living and the non-living.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Diana Coole and Samantha Frost eds., New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics<\/em> (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 5.<\/span> Van Dijk clearly considers the human body as an epistemic and material knot, in which the natural and artificial, as well as the present and the future are hybridized. By combining an ethics of care with a techno-scientific and artistic approach, Van Dijk adopts a radical xenofeminist position,5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Xenofeminists are working to deconstruct gender norms using critique, the emancipation of technologies, and queer theories as levers. They thus adopt a radically anti-naturalist and technomaterialist posture, thought of as an extension of cyberfeminism and neomaterialism.<\/span> questioning how ageing, failing, and non-standard bodies are treated at the dawn of a future in which our skins will be increasingly modified by techno-scientific developments and the proliferation of plastic. Probing the porosity of the boundaries between what we define as human and what is beyond human, Van Dijk\u2019s work, like that of xenofeminists in general, raises fundamental and ethical questions as to what<\/em> we are, namely, \u201cadamantly synthetic.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Laboria Cuboniks, Manifeste x\u00e9nof\u00e9ministe : une politique de l\u2019ali\u00e9nation<\/em>, trans. Marie-Mathilde Burdeau and No\u00e9mie Grunenwald (Geneva: \u00c9ditions Entremonde, 2019 [2016]), 29, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Pleun-van-Dijk\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Pleun-van-Dijk_Reborn_RonaldSmits.jpg\")
Pleun van Dijk<\/strong>
Reborn<\/em>, performance view, MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, 2016.
Photo: Ronald Smits, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nForeign Bodies<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThe idea of proliferation, contamination, or even colonization by synthetic materials is central to the work of Dan Lam, a US artist of Vietnamese origin who was born in a refugee camp in the Philippines. Both seductive and strange, her sculptural works offer a poetic exploration of the material and critical properties of plastic. For the past ten years or so, she has been exploring the tension between the \u201cforeign\u201d nature of plastic and what defines our own humanity, or at least what we perceive of it. Made of recycled polyurethane foam, silicone, acrylic paint, and resin, Lam\u2019s anthropomorphic or protozoic creatures are unsettling. Their viscous tentacles and bubonic deformities contaminate the spaces they inhabit, threatening the integrity of the bodies and spaces that host them. The works are both troubling and bewildering, despite their enchanting appearance, as Lam exploits the material qualities of plastic to create tension between living and non-living, between human and plastic. Soft and gooey drips coalesce, eruptions of resin proliferate, trickles of silicone coagulate. Each sculpture evokes a foreign<\/em> entity\u2014with some titles suggesting extraterrestrial origins\u2014whose vibrant colours signal caution: Lam does not hide her interest in aposematism, the capacity of certain plant and animal species to adopt vivid colours to warn of their toxicity.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Kristin Farr, \u201cDan Lam: Doing the Most,\u201d Juxtapoz Magazine<\/em>, August 14, 2017, accessible online.<\/span> Like Van Dijk, she conjures a speculative imaginary, taking bacteria, blobs, and fungus as motifs to evoke the notions of inoculation or contamination, with plastic being a potential new force that claims the territory of the living. Lam\u2019s creatures could also be seen as metaphors for the systemic xenophobia experienced by migrants, raising issues related to colonialism in the age of the Plastocene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Dan-Lam\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Dan-Lam_Terrestrial-IM-scaled.jpg\")
Dan Lam<\/strong>
Terrestrial<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Dan](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Dan-Lam_Arrangement-IM-scaled.jpg\")
Dan Lam<\/strong>
Arrangement<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Dan-Lam\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Dan-Lam_MatingCall-IM-scaled.jpg\")
Dan Lam<\/strong>
Mating Call<\/em>, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nIn this context, with our flesh subjected to the pharmaceutical, agricultural, and petrochemical industries, have our bodies not become terrae nullius<\/em> for enhancements and a new form of coexistence with synthetic materials? Such coexistence in the Plastocene is based on a literal interpretation of the term \u201csynthetic,\u201d suggesting relationality or a being-with (neomaterialists would speak of intra-action and relational ontology). Theoretically at least, this relationality offers a loophole of sorts for that which xenofeminists have named \u201cthe infection of purity.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Cuboniks, Manifeste x\u00e9nof\u00e9ministe<\/em>, 51.<\/span> As they state in their manifesto, why not consider currently occurring endocrino-chemical mutations as a lever for rethinking the contingencies of our technologized contemporaneity and its industrial modes of production of the \u201cnatural\u201d?9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Cuboniks, Manifeste x\u00e9nof\u00e9ministe<\/em>, 77.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\nIn short, it is no longer possible to isolate the human body from these other, material, non-human forces that are increasingly constitutive of who we are. This \u201cextraneity,\u201d to use a term dear to xenofeminists, reveals an inherent incertitude or ambiguity that defies the epistemes of good\/bad, us\/them. It invites us to imagine other forms of truly synthetic becoming, while questioning the conditions of contemporary biochemical existence, beyond the anthropocentric gaze that still dominates Western thought today. It is a question not of adopting a defeatist stance, less still of promoting a Promethean technopositive discourse, but of \u201crefus[ing] human exceptionalism,\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene<\/em> (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 13.<\/span> as Donna J. Haraway so aptly put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Dan-Lam\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Nibble_HighRes-FLAT-2-IM-scaled.jpg\")
Dan Lam<\/strong>
Nibble<\/em>, 2020.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Dan-Lam\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Dan-Lam_ElixirofLife-scaled.jpg\")
Dan Lam<\/strong>
Elixir of Life<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The Desire for Plastic<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nWith her xenomorphic installations made of latex, silicone, and synthetic fabrics, Catalan artist Eva F\u00e0bregas seeks to transcend literal associations and categories by drawing on a speculative aesthetic, as do Van Dijk and Lam. In the vein of Eva Hesse, a key artist for those wishing to understand the first critical uses of plastic in sculpture, F\u00e0bregas creates highly charismatic abstract installations that also evoke the notion of extraneity. Like Hesse, whose sculptures drew on primary instincts and a prelinguistic state due to their somatic dimensions, F\u00e0bregas\u2019s referencing of the body is unequivocal, giving full rein to the haptic qualities of matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Devouring Lovers<\/em> (2023), a site-specific installation created in the main hall of Hamburger Bahnhof, in Berlin, showcases this coexistence of the organic and synthetic. Like parasites on their host, the soft corporeal bodies of F\u00e0bregas\u2019s iconoclastic beings take siege of the hall\u2019s singular architecture, appearing to ooze through it, even strangle it. Vividly coloured and swaying heavily in the space like viscera or alien creatures, the sculptures are mesmerizing. It\u2019s unclear whether these beings are friends or foes, but one thing is certain: the works seduce and arouse a desire for the material\u2014to caress it and to be caressed by it. It is these \u201cnew sensorial regimes,\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Davis, \u201cLife and Death in the Anthropocene,\u201d 349.<\/span> as Heather Davis notes, that unite xenofeminists and neomaterialists in defending the agentivity of technology and matter: a reversal of the anthropocentric relationships between the body (active, desiring, dominant) and matter (passive, desired, submissive). Here, plastic is a carrier of desire and sensuality, capable of privileged proximity to the body. Unsurprisingly perhaps, F\u00e0bregas\u2019s works conjure the singular aesthetic vocabulary of the vibrator, dildo, and other sex toys. Some of her installations, including Devouring Lovers<\/em>, are literally equipped with electronic devices that produce vibrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Eva-Fabregas\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Duboir_Eva-Fabregas_DevouringLovers_00018-scaled.jpg\")
Eva F\u00e0bregas<\/strong>
Devouring Lovers<\/em>, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2023.
Photo: Jacopo La Forgia, courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Eva-Fabregas\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Duboir_Eva-Fabregas_DevouringLovers_00003-scaled.jpg\")
Eva F\u00e0bregas<\/strong>
Devouring Lovers<\/em>, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2023.
Photo: Jacopo La Forgia, courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThe installation Exudates<\/em> (2024), presented in the former Matar\u00f3 prison (now Matar\u00f3 Art Contemporani) during Manifesta 15, is an extension of F\u00e0bregas\u2019s research on this tension between the living body and the built environment. Oozing from and bubbling on the prison walls, ceiling, and floor, strange forms proliferate like pestilent discharges liberated from this disused space. Again, F\u00e0bregas uses latex and synthetic fibres to play with their capacity to blur the boundaries between organic and inorganic. As the installation\u2019s title suggests, she was inspired by exudate, an accumulation of secretions of pathological origins produced by a living organism. Despite being symptomatic of inflammation or disease, exudate could also be seen as a materialization of healing. With Exudates<\/em>, F\u00e0bregas revives the dialogue between this former place of detention and the bodies that inhabited it, synthetic creatures that embody the will to rehabilitate through matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Eva-Fabregas\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Eva-Fabregas_Exudates_DSC4955.jpg\")
Eva F\u00e0bregas<\/strong>
Exudates<\/em>, installation views, MAC\u2014Matar\u00f3 Art Contemporani, Matar\u00f3, 2024.
Photos: Roberto Ruiz, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Eva-Fabregas\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/113_DO_Dubois_Eva-Fabregas_Exudates_DSC5087.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nThis posture of solicitude also traverses the work of Van Dijk and Lam. Indeed, all three artists are interested in the agentive\u2014and speculative\u2014potential of plastics to grasp our synthetic futures. The notion of desire and the haptic dimension are also deeply ingrained in their respective practices, which seem to firmly embrace the new sensorial regimes offered by plastic. If, at one time, the word \u201cplastic\u201d was used to designate something artificial or fake, based on the work of these artists, it now transcends this dual rapport with the natural. Undoubtedly, we must remain critical in the face of the plastic mutation that characterizes the Plastocene and its consequences for the health of our ecosystems. And we must also admit that this transformation is pushing us toward a new epistemological and material approach to our bodies, beyond the binary structures that have until now shaped our understanding of the living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHolding a master\u2019s degree in art history with a focus on feminist studies, Anne-Marie Dubois borrows the critical potential of feminist and queer theories to debunk the ontological pretences of different discourses of truth.<\/p>\n\n\n
Replika<\/em>, performance view, Roskilde Festival, Danemark, 2018.
Photo: Nahmlos, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
By taking the assembly-line techniques emblematic of the capitalist system and the technical equipment of the science laboratory as motifs, Replika<\/em> questions the disputable probity of the pharma-technological structures associated with normalizing bodies: neoliberal structures generated by the patriarchy that constantly force-feeds us\u2014at high prices\u2014synthetic hormones, make-up, and all kinds of implants in order to mould our bodies to conform to their arbitrary standards (of sex, gender, capacity, etc.). The ostentatious deformities of the Replika<\/em> babies are not necessarily being condemned; instead, they reflect the urgency of confronting the discomfort we may feel in the face of something that could\u2014or could not\u2014be considered \u201cabnormal\u201d or \u201cimpure\u201d in this era that is slowly becoming known as the Plastocene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Reborn<\/em>, Van Dijk uses silicone moulding to produce substitute \u201cskins,\u201d capable of mitigating bodily ageing or of replacing the epidermis following an injury, for example. A dystopian extension of plastic surgery, which aims at remodelling parts of the body affected by disease or trauma, Reborn<\/em> imagines a future in which, thanks to synthetic materials, it would literally be possible to switch skins\u2014a moulting that is already occurring within our bodies through the chemical substances that we ingest. Neomaterialist theorists Diana Coole and Samantha Frost emphasize that this saturation of inorganic materials in the intimacy of our living bodies itself justifies the urgency of treating them no longer as passive surfaces but as agents contributing to a redefinition of the mutually exclusive categories of the living and the non-living.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Diana Coole and Samantha Frost eds., New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics<\/em> (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 5.<\/span> Van Dijk clearly considers the human body as an epistemic and material knot, in which the natural and artificial, as well as the present and the future are hybridized. By combining an ethics of care with a techno-scientific and artistic approach, Van Dijk adopts a radical xenofeminist position,5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Xenofeminists are working to deconstruct gender norms using critique, the emancipation of technologies, and queer theories as levers. They thus adopt a radically anti-naturalist and technomaterialist posture, thought of as an extension of cyberfeminism and neomaterialism.<\/span> questioning how ageing, failing, and non-standard bodies are treated at the dawn of a future in which our skins will be increasingly modified by techno-scientific developments and the proliferation of plastic. Probing the porosity of the boundaries between what we define as human and what is beyond human, Van Dijk\u2019s work, like that of xenofeminists in general, raises fundamental and ethical questions as to what<\/em> we are, namely, \u201cadamantly synthetic.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Laboria Cuboniks, Manifeste x\u00e9nof\u00e9ministe : une politique de l\u2019ali\u00e9nation<\/em>, trans. Marie-Mathilde Burdeau and No\u00e9mie Grunenwald (Geneva: \u00c9ditions Entremonde, 2019 [2016]), 29, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The idea of proliferation, contamination, or even colonization by synthetic materials is central to the work of Dan Lam, a US artist of Vietnamese origin who was born in a refugee camp in the Philippines. Both seductive and strange, her sculptural works offer a poetic exploration of the material and critical properties of plastic. For the past ten years or so, she has been exploring the tension between the \u201cforeign\u201d nature of plastic and what defines our own humanity, or at least what we perceive of it. Made of recycled polyurethane foam, silicone, acrylic paint, and resin, Lam\u2019s anthropomorphic or protozoic creatures are unsettling. Their viscous tentacles and bubonic deformities contaminate the spaces they inhabit, threatening the integrity of the bodies and spaces that host them. The works are both troubling and bewildering, despite their enchanting appearance, as Lam exploits the material qualities of plastic to create tension between living and non-living, between human and plastic. Soft and gooey drips coalesce, eruptions of resin proliferate, trickles of silicone coagulate. Each sculpture evokes a foreign<\/em> entity\u2014with some titles suggesting extraterrestrial origins\u2014whose vibrant colours signal caution: Lam does not hide her interest in aposematism, the capacity of certain plant and animal species to adopt vivid colours to warn of their toxicity.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Kristin Farr, \u201cDan Lam: Doing the Most,\u201d Juxtapoz Magazine<\/em>, August 14, 2017, accessible online.<\/span> Like Van Dijk, she conjures a speculative imaginary, taking bacteria, blobs, and fungus as motifs to evoke the notions of inoculation or contamination, with plastic being a potential new force that claims the territory of the living. Lam\u2019s creatures could also be seen as metaphors for the systemic xenophobia experienced by migrants, raising issues related to colonialism in the age of the Plastocene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this context, with our flesh subjected to the pharmaceutical, agricultural, and petrochemical industries, have our bodies not become terrae nullius<\/em> for enhancements and a new form of coexistence with synthetic materials? Such coexistence in the Plastocene is based on a literal interpretation of the term \u201csynthetic,\u201d suggesting relationality or a being-with (neomaterialists would speak of intra-action and relational ontology). Theoretically at least, this relationality offers a loophole of sorts for that which xenofeminists have named \u201cthe infection of purity.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Cuboniks, Manifeste x\u00e9nof\u00e9ministe<\/em>, 51.<\/span> As they state in their manifesto, why not consider currently occurring endocrino-chemical mutations as a lever for rethinking the contingencies of our technologized contemporaneity and its industrial modes of production of the \u201cnatural\u201d?9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Cuboniks, Manifeste x\u00e9nof\u00e9ministe<\/em>, 77.<\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n In short, it is no longer possible to isolate the human body from these other, material, non-human forces that are increasingly constitutive of who we are. This \u201cextraneity,\u201d to use a term dear to xenofeminists, reveals an inherent incertitude or ambiguity that defies the epistemes of good\/bad, us\/them. It invites us to imagine other forms of truly synthetic becoming, while questioning the conditions of contemporary biochemical existence, beyond the anthropocentric gaze that still dominates Western thought today. It is a question not of adopting a defeatist stance, less still of promoting a Promethean technopositive discourse, but of \u201crefus[ing] human exceptionalism,\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene<\/em> (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 13.<\/span> as Donna J. Haraway so aptly put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With her xenomorphic installations made of latex, silicone, and synthetic fabrics, Catalan artist Eva F\u00e0bregas seeks to transcend literal associations and categories by drawing on a speculative aesthetic, as do Van Dijk and Lam. In the vein of Eva Hesse, a key artist for those wishing to understand the first critical uses of plastic in sculpture, F\u00e0bregas creates highly charismatic abstract installations that also evoke the notion of extraneity. Like Hesse, whose sculptures drew on primary instincts and a prelinguistic state due to their somatic dimensions, F\u00e0bregas\u2019s referencing of the body is unequivocal, giving full rein to the haptic qualities of matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Devouring Lovers<\/em> (2023), a site-specific installation created in the main hall of Hamburger Bahnhof, in Berlin, showcases this coexistence of the organic and synthetic. Like parasites on their host, the soft corporeal bodies of F\u00e0bregas\u2019s iconoclastic beings take siege of the hall\u2019s singular architecture, appearing to ooze through it, even strangle it. Vividly coloured and swaying heavily in the space like viscera or alien creatures, the sculptures are mesmerizing. It\u2019s unclear whether these beings are friends or foes, but one thing is certain: the works seduce and arouse a desire for the material\u2014to caress it and to be caressed by it. It is these \u201cnew sensorial regimes,\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Davis, \u201cLife and Death in the Anthropocene,\u201d 349.<\/span> as Heather Davis notes, that unite xenofeminists and neomaterialists in defending the agentivity of technology and matter: a reversal of the anthropocentric relationships between the body (active, desiring, dominant) and matter (passive, desired, submissive). Here, plastic is a carrier of desire and sensuality, capable of privileged proximity to the body. Unsurprisingly perhaps, F\u00e0bregas\u2019s works conjure the singular aesthetic vocabulary of the vibrator, dildo, and other sex toys. Some of her installations, including Devouring Lovers<\/em>, are literally equipped with electronic devices that produce vibrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The installation Exudates<\/em> (2024), presented in the former Matar\u00f3 prison (now Matar\u00f3 Art Contemporani) during Manifesta 15, is an extension of F\u00e0bregas\u2019s research on this tension between the living body and the built environment. Oozing from and bubbling on the prison walls, ceiling, and floor, strange forms proliferate like pestilent discharges liberated from this disused space. Again, F\u00e0bregas uses latex and synthetic fibres to play with their capacity to blur the boundaries between organic and inorganic. As the installation\u2019s title suggests, she was inspired by exudate, an accumulation of secretions of pathological origins produced by a living organism. Despite being symptomatic of inflammation or disease, exudate could also be seen as a materialization of healing. With Exudates<\/em>, F\u00e0bregas revives the dialogue between this former place of detention and the bodies that inhabited it, synthetic creatures that embody the will to rehabilitate through matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This posture of solicitude also traverses the work of Van Dijk and Lam. Indeed, all three artists are interested in the agentive\u2014and speculative\u2014potential of plastics to grasp our synthetic futures. The notion of desire and the haptic dimension are also deeply ingrained in their respective practices, which seem to firmly embrace the new sensorial regimes offered by plastic. If, at one time, the word \u201cplastic\u201d was used to designate something artificial or fake, based on the work of these artists, it now transcends this dual rapport with the natural. Undoubtedly, we must remain critical in the face of the plastic mutation that characterizes the Plastocene and its consequences for the health of our ecosystems. And we must also admit that this transformation is pushing us toward a new epistemological and material approach to our bodies, beyond the binary structures that have until now shaped our understanding of the living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Holding a master\u2019s degree in art history with a focus on feminist studies, Anne-Marie Dubois borrows the critical potential of feminist and queer theories to debunk the ontological pretences of different discourses of truth.<\/p>\n\n\n
Reborn<\/em>, performance view, MU Hybrid Art House, Eindhoven, 2016.
Photo: Ronald Smits, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nForeign Bodies<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Terrestrial<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Arrangement<\/em>, 2023.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Mating Call<\/em>, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Nibble<\/em>, 2020.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Elixir of Life<\/em>, 2022.
Photo: courtesy of Dan Lam Studio, Dallas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
The Desire for Plastic<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Devouring Lovers<\/em>, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2023.
Photo: Jacopo La Forgia, courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Devouring Lovers<\/em>, installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, 2023.
Photo: Jacopo La Forgia, courtesy of Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof\u2013Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Exudates<\/em>, installation views, MAC\u2014Matar\u00f3 Art Contemporani, Matar\u00f3, 2024.
Photos: Roberto Ruiz, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n