Castaway: The Afterlife of Plastic, by the art collective TRES, is an art-research project that investigates plastic’s enduring presence in global ecosystems. Since 2016, TRES has searched for and photographed marine debris and plastic that has washed up on the Australian shores of Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania. Using photography, maps, and collected artifacts, the collective documents how plastic castaways of contemporary culture become embedded in landscapes—often unnoticed yet ever-present. Castaway’s visual poetry, mimicry, and humor aim to prompt reflection on humanity’s materiality, use, and deep entanglement with plastic. At the same time, the project speculates about new forms of coexistence in which life and synthetic matter evolve together in unexpected ways.
Presented in Spanish with English translation. A reception and exhibition preview will follow in the galleries of the Peabody Museum.
Free and open to the public. Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage.
Advance registration recommended
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture, in collaboration with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Learn more about the art collective TRES and the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography at the Peabody Museum.
TRES was founded in Mexico City in 2009. Through their art they engage with critical ecosystems and the socio-territorial implications of the residual–trash. Focused on exploring the associations between humans and non-humans, their curiosity has centered on the investigation of garbage as a socio(aesth)etic residue that has political, biological, and material implications. Their artistic practice is meant to investigate micro and macro phenomena of waste assemblies that entangle human and non-humans.
Originally grounding their practice-based research on specific, local pieces of refuse, they now explore global patterns of discard and distribution. Based on their multi-sited and multi-format research, they translate their findings into socio-aesthetic installations, which challenge notions of conventional scale and space.
TRES was a Jumex Foundation grantee (2022, 2019); Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee (2020). In 2015 they won the WMA Commission for the first Ubiquitous Trash project in Hong Kong, producing a book and exhibition that explore the global mobility of marine debris. Their work has been shown in North and South America, Europe and Asia, at the Centro de Arte Santa Monica (Barcelona, Spain, 2023); Espacios Revelados Lima (Peru, 2022); Perth Center for Photography (Australia, 2022); among others. TRES represented Mexico in the 13th Biennale of La Havana (Cuba, 2019).
boltvinik is artist-researcher at IAP, Universidad Veracruzana. She studied visual art at “La Esmeralda” National School of Art in Mexico City, attended the Rijksakademie (2000), Amsterdam, and holds a PhD in Social Sciences from UAM-Cuajimalpa (Mexico).
viñas studied art theory at Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, and postgraduate studies in Visual Arts at UNAM (Mexico) and at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain). He was curator of photography at Centro de la Imagen (Mexico).
Both have held National System of Art Creators grant in Mexico.
Madeline Murphy Turner is a curator and art historian whose practice centers on contemporary art of the Americas. She is the Emily Rauh Pulitzer Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Drawings at the Harvard Art Museums, where she is curating Drawn to Earth: Contemporary Art and Environment in the Americas, and co-curating with Mitra Abbaspour Edna Andrade: Imagination Is Never Static.
A specialist in contemporary art from Latin America, Madeline’s writing can be found in academic journals and books, exhibition catalogs, and experimental online platforms, including La Escuela__, where she is also a Board Member. She is the co-editor of Momentum: Art and Ecology in Contemporary Latin America, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in January 2025, and has several forthcoming essays on topics that include experimental artistic practice in 1980s Mexico City and modern art in Guatemala during the Civil War.
Madeline has held positions at the Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA; The Grey Art Museum; and Cecilia de Torres Gallery. She has a Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
LOCATION:Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250515T220000Z DTEND:20250516T003000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR