Small multicolored spots float in the sea, appearing on sandy shores and rocky areas; marine animals and birds accidentally ingest them. This seductive material, with its versatile and durable qualities, embodies the contradictions of our time. These are fragments of plastic products.

The forces of nature—the movement of the tides, ultraviolet light, and the morphology of the oceans—degrade the plastic products we discard, such as bottles, bags, packaging, containers, and toys, breaking them down into fragments, into small pieces, until they become particles.

**What Are Those Floating Spots?** is a symphony of materialities that brings together complex realities: tensions between the allure of the material, the different facets of human creation, and an escalating environmental problem that is making us all sick. For this reason, in this work, suspended between the boundaries of painting and installation, I incorporate plastic waste as part of a pictorial and spatial construction made up of fragments. A painting that transforms into an unsettling, multicolored spatial reality, while at the same time, a reality that becomes a pictorial work.

*What Are Those Floating Spots?* emerges from the question that gives the work its title, from a curiosity about the surrounding environment. On the one hand, it refers to the history of painting as a space for documenting its time and context, a place of study and abstraction that engages our gaze and invites us to contemplate our problems and realities. On the other hand, it explores a contemporary space for experimentation in which I approach painting as a pictorial construction, organizing planes of color within two- and three-dimensional space to create a visual journey and experience through color.

Asking myself, *What Are Those Floating Spots?* and embarking on this project—which is more a journey of reflection than a single artwork—led me to discover the impact of microplastics. In 2022, the United Nations revealed that approximately eleven million metric tons of plastic are discarded into the oceans every year. It warned that, unless action is taken, by 2050 there could be around 12 billion metric tons of plastic waste accumulated in landfills and the ocean. Raising awareness about the impact of this material on the oceans is urgent.

Since plastic first emerged in the global economy, this material has been silently invading the planet’s oceans and beaches, reaching unimaginable levels today. It has even formed vast islands in the middle of the oceans, concentrating thousands of tons of plastic, and it is now present throughout the planet.

Embedded Presences

The tree trunk and the plastics embedded in it are silent witnesses to how whatever arrives and takes hold alters both narrative and existence. In this work, plastic becomes another element of the natural environment, reflecting a world in which coexisting tensions shape the landscape.

The concept of embedded refers both to the stubborn fixation of an idea in the mind and to the violent act of attaching or driving one object into another. This work explores the insidious expansion of plastic into the most remote corners of nature, using a tree trunk collected from the seashore as a symbol of vulnerability. Plastic fragments become embedded in its surface, symbolizing the complex and often violent relationships between the elements that converge within a territory.

This piece confronts the seductive and paradoxical appearance of plastic, which, despite its colorful allure, represents an intrusive presence, particularly in the natural environment, where its usefulness has been eclipsed by its ubiquity. At the same time, the work questions global discourses of development and sustainability which, although they promote ideals of the future, remain rooted in economic models based on capital and narratives of linear progress. These discourses tend to homogenize cultures and impose an ideal of development that fails to fully account for cultural diversity or social and environmental complexities.

The work invites us to reflect on the contradictions and multiple dimensions that emerge between the appearance of these discourses, materialities, and the underlying dynamics of development models. It proposes a critique of the anthropocentric and colonial worldview while inviting us to use imagination as a method of inquiry.

Embedded Presences

To move, to get lost, to drift, to let go of control.

To run aground, to withstand the impact.

Wound, rest, tree skin,
monkey skin, bark.
Beast skin.

To mutate and mutate again.

Testimonies and fragments.

Whatever arrives takes hold,
alters the narrative,
alters existence.

Invasions, landings,
declarations of permanence.

Lost saviors,
spilled blood.

A severed landscape,
a stolen landscape.

To fix an idea, to embed it.

Body, trunk, and then fusion.

Thorn, machete, claws.

Color, pretty, pretty.

Then discourse, figurine after figurine.

Plastic, batteries, and all things clean.

Have the engines been switched off?

The vessel is gone.

Is there nothing left?

A presence,
s i l e n c e, splinters,
something in the sand.