An Ecosystem of Excess

With Pinar Yoldas and Regine Hengge

The Turkish artist Pinar Yoldas centers her work on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a garbage vortex made up of several million tons of plastic waste in the North Pacific. According to the “primordial soup” theory, life on earth began four billion years ago in the oceans, when inorganic matter turned into organic molecules. Today, the oceans have become a plastic soup. Pinar Yoldas asks what life forms would emerge from the primeval sludge of today’s oceans.

With the evolutionary experiment “An Ecosystem of Excess” she created a post-human ecosystem of speculative organisms and their imagined environment. Regine Hengge, professor of microbiology, has isolated and grown the bacteria from Yoldas’ “Plastic Soup” and includes them in a demonstration of the visual wonders of bacterial microfilms.

Recording: Audio