Anatomy of a Material

At Mediamatic, along the canal, discarded objects carried by Amsterdam’s currents accumulate at the dock: wrappers, bottles, fragments of packaging... Mixed together, their origins dissolve. Plastic embodies our disposable society.

Once celebrated as a miracle material, it is now omnipresent, and largely unnoticed. The research explores how sensitive engagement might be reactivated through devalued materials.

Through different degrees of transformation, shifts of scale, displacement or alteration, materials may begin to appear otherwise. Such transformation can unfold in the manner of a slow craft practice, grounded in sustained attention to the material itself, where time, repetition, and touch become conditions for renewed perception.

These material studies examine the threshold at which something is considered finished, negligible, ready to disappear. Where does abandonment begin? And who decides what deserves to vanish?

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Enora Cressan

Enora's work is grounded in the exploration of residual, unstable, or devalued substances (she worked with dust, fish skin, rust, or plastic) as vectors of an ecology of attention. Through their transformation, these materials become hybrid and ambiguous surfaces of interrogation; they unsettle perception and open spaces for dialogue within contexts often distant from dominant ecological discourses.

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