The Ministry of Plastic (touring exhibition) is an installation that stages a future in which there is no more oil and plastic has become a cherished and valuable resource. It takes the form of an exhibition in a salvaged shipping container, which functions as a future museum exhibition and recruitment centre.

The exhibition chronicles the demise of a plastic-fuelled society and the birth of a world in which everything is recycled and reused. Employing the aesthetics and strategies of museum display, real and fictitious objects, carefully displayed in glass vitrines, narrate this story. At the centre of this museum is the sacred text of this future world, The Rubbish Companion. This is a guidebook to plastic, written in our future by an unknown hero and used by future governments to educate people into how plastic must be consciously used and recycled.

The Ministry of Plastic (touring exhibition) is not merely an exhibition about the of plastic, it tries to recruit young men and women to work in The Plastic Harvest. In this future any plastic finds in former landfills or remote corners of the oceans are incredibly valuable. In one emotional testimony a young woman recounts the experience of touching wild plastic for the first time.

This installation tries to re-imagine a future in which recycling will become vital and necessary for survival and asks the question of who will control these recycled resources. Plastic is essential to the distribution and transport of consumer goods, it is the lubricant of the capitalist economy. Will recycling be placed at the service of a Neoliberal agenday? 0r will it challenge, and transcend capitalism, suggesting genuinely sustainable, future methods of living?

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Thanks to: Jens Mühlhoff

Supported by: Innogy Foundation, Artport,full project