I Travelled the Seven Seas and I'm still Alive

I Travelled the Seven Seas and I'm still Alive is a work about plastic in the ocean. According to the Italian observatory, Goleta Verde , in 2014, on average, for every square kilometer of ocean there are 27 pieces of garbage, of which 90% are plastic. This has profoundly negative consequences on the environment and on marine life, without even beginning to take into account the impact of micro plastics entering the food chain. Out of this problem was born the project ʻ I travelled the Seven Seas and I m Still Aliveʼ which deals with the fact that every generation has itʼs own particular road to travel and has associated objects that it carries with it on the way. Some of theses objects become collectors pieces, they are cared for, kept as tokens of the time whilst others are discarded, destroyed and in this case of garbage in the ocean simply and mindlessly abandoned. I imagined that these objects carried by the sea and washed up onto the worlds beaches ( in places even as remote as Easter Island ) would have provoked a certain sense of disgust in the population but it seems that as time goes by, the sad and slow normalization of this process has meant that the public has simply got used to seeing all this plastic on the beach thus sadly becoming desensitized to it. I wanted therefore to re look at this from the perspective of the objectʼs identity as being exploited, abandoned and avoided. I did this by removing items from the beach because this is not a place where they should be, and I put them in the context of a photographic set. I placed them on a perspex surface, reflective like water of the sea but black like that which is lifeless, then I gave them a photographic treatment as if they were objects for an advertising campaign. I gave them an air of glamour. I gave them the feel of soldiers returning home from war, battered and bruised. I idealized their wounds and conferred upon them the aura of having survived storms, wind, rain, sun and salt. I wished to reshape them as warriors – never victorious but at the same time never giving up. Warriors that will not go away by themselves unless we wake up and deal with them ourselves, all of us.