Trashcapes
Cyanotype prints, installation, shells
2024
In 2024, Sirente began developing TRASHCAPES (THE AFTER LIFE), a large-scale cyanotype project imagining what might remain of humanity after its disappearance. Rather than monuments or cultural achievements, the traces left behind are fragments of consumption: plastic bottles, oil and soap containers, fishing nets, toothbrushes, candy wrappers and branded packaging scattered along the African coast.
Collected from beaches and transformed through the cyanotype process, these objects become archaeological specimens of a vanished species. Recognisable logos and industrial forms survive as traces of a civilisation defined by an almost obsessive proliferation of objects. Detached from the world that produced them, they become strangely alien—relics of a culture that no longer exists.
The project extends into an installation incorporating very old shells from Africa, their surfaces gradually worn, eroded and transformed by time. Set against the synthetic permanence of plastic, the shells introduce another temporal dimension: matter shaped slowly by nature, existing long before humanity and potentially enduring beyond it. Together, the shells and discarded objects create a speculative archaeological landscape in which different traces of time coexist.
The deep Prussian blue of the cyanotypes transforms the collected debris into abstract, oceanic landscapes, suspended between photographic document, archaeological record and imagined memory. Beauty and decay coexist, while the familiar language of consumer culture—its logos, packaging and synthetic materials—is stripped of its original function and reduced to evidence.
TRASHCAPES (THE AFTER LIFE) imagines a future in which there is no one left to remember what these objects meant. What survives is matter: plastic, shells, sediment, traces of industry and fragments of a species that disappeared. The work becomes a speculative archaeology of humanity, asking what our civilisation might look like when observed from a time in which we are no longer there.
Medium: Cyanotype, installation, shells
Average dimensions: 130 × 80 cm