Are We Plastic? Art and Thinking After Plastic – Lecture by Ingrid Halland

Date: Monday, November 18, 2019, 17:30-19:00

Location: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV, room HG-08A33

CLUE+ Paradigms of Creativity & Environmental Humanities Center, together with the Graduate School of Humanities present:

Are We Plastic? Art and Thinking After Plastic, a lecture by Ingrid Halland, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim

This talk investigates a full-scale plastic bunker made by Italian architect Gaetano Pesce in 1972. Pesce’s speculative design installation was constructed as a site of escape that could save mankind from an environmental catastrophe. By investigating the technical specifications and the metaphysical properties of plastic, Ingrid Halland proposes that Pesce’s polyurethane bunker points towards a new understanding of the material. This understanding challenges the conventional way of thinking about the material as a physical counterpart of capitalist globalization, and argues instead that plastics must be understood as a dialectic between flexibility and destructiveness.

Ingrid Halland is an architecture and design historian and art critic based in Oslo/Trondheim, Norway. She is an Associate Professor at the Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) where she teaches contemporary art theory, politics of aesthetics, and art historiography. Her research interests include late-20th century architecture and design, aesthetic theory, and continental philosophy, as well as ethics of globalization, post-structuralism, and philosophy of technology. Her doctoral thesis Error Earth: Displaying Deep Cybernetics in ‘The Universitas Project’ and ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’, 1972 examines the interdependencies of cybernetics, ecology, and ontology in postmodern architecture and design. 

Facebook event