Artwork
Forensic photography
After eye-witnessing immense amounts of plastic coming from the ocean in remote Hawaii in 2005, I created the Drifters Project, a conceptually based artistic research project focusing on vagrant plastic pollution, the global marker of the Anthropocene. Begun as a solo endeavor, over time my work shifted to a form of collective art activism and is now an elastic, international collaborative focusing on ocean plastic pollution. I lead forensic beach cleaning training, photographing deposition sites and the haunting objects I discover, removing tens of thousands of pounds of plastic in the past 17 years. Framed within a conversation on globalism, conservation + climate change, Drifters Project involves painting, photography, sculpture and installation to address the troubling psychological relationship of humans to the natural world.
The world’s ocean currents bring an astonishing array of plastic debris that collects in the sea caves and beaches of coastal zones across the globe. The currents transport and mix the debris into a colony of drifters that temporarily alight and gather onshore, an amazing and shocking visual array of the stuff of global consumerism. I remove this material from the natural environment and resituate in the social space by making meticulous installations and sculptures of the collected debris and large-scale site photographs of the disturbed locations.
I see the plastic as a portrait of global late-capitalist consumer society and serves as a siren call to humanity that our actions have pervasive and far-reaching effects. The plastic elements initially seem attractive and innocuous, like toys, some with an eerie familiarity and some totally alien. At first, plastic seems innocent and fun, but it is not, it is dangerous. Photographic 'portraits’ of the uncanny objects are sad yet beautiful relics of human cultural anthropology. Physically seeing the material makes one see the world from a different perspective. Drifters Project provides a look at our material artifacts and their collision with nature, at once changed by the process, and changing the very substance of the earth and its creatures.
As we see images of common things like combs and toothbrushes, we recognize ourselves in these everyday objects that have been force-fed to the ocean. Drifters Project serves to catalog this materiality with forensic information: photo documentation, a museum label, (denoting the date, location, collector) and other data. The photographs have a strong emotional appeal because of the curiosity of the objects’ strange deformations by the forces of nature; their qualities of movement over time and space as drifters; their personal connection to us as humans; their ability to jog memory and body association; and the way they provide a mirror to ourselves showing our need to take responsibility for what we make and discard.
This work serves as a call to action, a record of our indisputable impact, a look at what we might be losing, and perhaps our last chance to reverse this trend.
Pam Longobardi’s parents, an ocean lifeguard and the Delaware state diving champion, connected her from an early age to water. After discovering mountains of plastic on remote Hawaiian shores in 2006, she founded the Drifters Project, centralizing the artist as culture worker/activist/researcher. Now a global collaborative entity, Drifters Project has removed tens of thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situated it as communicative social sculpture. Winner of the prestigious Hudgens Prize Longobardi has been featured in National Geographic, SIERRA magazine, the Weather Channel and in exhibitions around the world. She is Oceanic Society’s Artist In Nature, and Distinguished University Professor and Regent’s Professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta.