This study, at the intersection of decolonial studies and nonhuman discourses, attempts to address the materiality and vitality of plastic litter and its currents. Behind the flow of plastic waste and its natural environment occupation, we discover the dark side of the human-centered narrative of modernity. Plastic waste reproduces and fortifies the world’s racial, gendered, and socioeconomic structure by contaminating and impacting the marginalized lives of humans and nonhumans. Plastic creates the global environment’s flow and persistently engenders another form of colonial structure by revealing the limitations of the human-centered modern world view through natural and social crises. At the same time, plastic waste shows that unruly and vital materiality is out of human control throughout the world’s topography reformation. In this sense, the plastic flow visualizes the silenced nonhuman world, the otherness that is the colonial difference of the nonhuman power hidden in the anthropocentric modern world. By examining the figure of plastic litter in Alejandro Durán’s artistic project Washed Up, this study intends to analyze the possible forms of decolonial topography and coexistence between human and nonhuman lives.

Alejandro Durán , Decoloniality , Nonhuman discourse , Plastic , Vitality