At Harvard's Peabody Museum, plastic as inspiration — and threat

Boston Globe

28-05-2025

Founded in Mexico City, in 2009, TRES comprises Ilana Boltvinik and Rodrigo Viñas. They take as their mission surveying trash, its effects, and how refuse and the consequences of its disposal endure. They're very much aware that throwing something away just means it ends up somewhere else. With 'Castaway,' the somewhere elses are the beaches of Australia and Tasmania.
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The show is an invitingly cunning jumble. It includes maps, postcards, marine specimens, a TRES notebook (fascinating to examine), and photographs of various discarded items as well as examples of such items. The photographs are unmatted, with black frames, making content rather than form the chief focus. The largest is 3 feet by nearly 2½ feet, the smallest is roughly 7 inches by 5 inches. Trash isn't uniform, so don't expect photographs of it to be.
TRES, "Strange Kind of Hope II," 2016.
The twist, and TRES likes twists, is how beautiful these objects can sometimes be. There's a bottle cap, for example, marbled blue by bryozoa, tiny marine organisms. In size and appearance, it could easily be mistaken for a gemstone or water-covered planet. The scary thing about 'Castaway,' as TRES intends, is this juxtaposition of beauty and damage.
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That particular bottle cap has a title: 'And Yet It Moves.' The title works as a double play on words. What you or I dispose of keeps on moving: to a landfill, the ocean, or, if incinerated, into the air. Yes, 'it,' whatever that it might be, moves, all right. And the title alludes to Galileo's legendary response to being told by the Catholic Church that it was heresy to state that the Earth travels around the sun. He knew otherwise. Now we're the ones choosing to ignore a different irrefutable movement, one much closer to home.
The TRES titles can be very funny, but in this context that can make them all the more dismaying. A photograph of a discarded rubber glove is called 'Intraterrestrial Ghost.' Fingers extended, it looks like a warning — or reproach. 'The Invasion of Everything' shows a sign advertising soft drinks. 'A Moon for Méliès (Le Voyage dans Lune)' presents a lunar-looking bottle cap — there are multiple bottle caps in 'Castaway' — which recalls the look of the destination in Georges Méliès's fabled silent film 'A Trip to the Moon' (1902).
TRES, "Agency, Of Hybrids and Other Things," 2016
In 'Under the Bottle Cap, the Iceberg,' we see a thrown-away water bottle. The play of associations is especially rich: 'tip of the iceberg,' icebergs and water, and (remembering where the bottle was found) that slogan favored by young radicals during the student protests in France in May 1968: 'Beneath the paving stones, the beach!' In this case, it becomes: 'On the beach, the trash!' That in turn, speaking of French filmmakers, connects to the celebrated credit in Jean Luc-Godard's 1966 film 'Masculin féminin': 'the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.' Coke bottles back then were glass rather than plastic. Not that that kept them from being tossed, by Communist kids and capitalist kids alike.
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'Castaway' is the rare art exhibition where the verbal matters no less than the visual or conceptual, thanks to the pungency and artfulness of the titles, along with the descriptive information explaining what we're looking at, which frequently is quite different than what we might assume we're looking at.
TRES, "Parallel Lives II," 2016.
As it happens, the works lack labels or captions. Instead, the information is available on placards, which visitors can pick up and consult. Or not. Looking at 'Castaway' without any textual information, then doing it again with placard in hand might be the best way to experience the show.
The Peabody awards a
CASTAWAY: The Afterlife of Plastic
At Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, 11 Divinity Ave., Cambridge, through April 6. 617-496-1027, peabody.harvard.edu
Mark Feeney can be reached at