Artistic Research and Material Agency

Following Recycled Plastic for a Critical and Affective Inquiry into Environmental Issues

Abstract

This article systematises the process of Artistic Research (AR), Following Recycled Plastic as a Raw Material, and the exhibition that emerged from this work, entitled A Floating Vortex of Plastic Waste, presented at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in 2025. The aim is to offer an overall understanding of the project, with an emphasis on the process, in order to reflect on material agency and intra-action (Barad), as well as to analyse the project’s impact in pedagogical reception contexts. The article highlights how the artistic practice developed through following recycled plastic and through crochet weaving produces critical, affective, and material knowledge. The analysis addresses two aspects. The first concerns the critical–creative process and the material decisions that led to the main piece of the exhibition. The second examines the reception of the exhibition by a group of university students. The article concludes that AR constitutes a rigorous and promising space for academic research capable of generating sensitive and transdisciplinary knowledge. Understood as a relational and speculative process, AR makes it possible to reveal processes of sensitive knowledge around the socio-environmental crisis, while also addressing the complexity of other contemporary problems and activating collective forms of critical, affective, and ethical thought in response to a planet in crisis.