Pleun van DijkReborn (detail), 2016.
Photo: Ronald Smits, courtesy of the artist

Plastic Skins

What do bisphenol A, phthalates, alkylphenols, triclosan, and perfluorinated compounds have in common? Aside from their somewhat hermetic nomenclature, they are all synthetic polymers that have definitively infiltrated the human body. Cleaning products, cosmetics, perfumes, clothing, cookware, and food packaging: everything around us contains plastics. The unsurpassed consistency of their molecular profiles combined with nominal production costs made plastics the holy grail of twentieth-century industry, the raw material of advanced capitalism.

Recent studies indicate that the intrusion of plastic into our lives has reached new levels, having crossed the blood-brain barrier: 0.5 percent of the human brain’s weight is now permanently composed of plastic microparticles and nanoparticles, the equivalent of two soup spoons of synthetic material.¹ 1 - Matthew Campen, Alexander Nihart, Marcus Garcia et al., “Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains Assessed by Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry,” preprint article, Nature Portfolio, May 6, 2024, accessible online. With chemical substances having a direct impact on our physical and mental health—including hormonal imbalances, reduced fertility, increased neurodegenerative diseases, disruption of the endocrine and immune systems, diabetes—this plastic mutation occurring within our bodies can no longer be denied; in the words of art historian and theorist Heather Davis, “There is no way to extract one’s life in the twentieth century from plastic… Plastic is a problem that cannot be externalized.”² 2 - Heather Davis, “Life and Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press), 349. We are synthetic.