CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University presents Castaway: The Afterlife of Plastic, an innovative exhibition by the art collective TRES. The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, May 17, 2025, offering an exploration of the impact of consumer waste on our world.
Founded in 2009 in Mexico City, the art collective TRES investigates the political, social, biological, and material effects of garbage and its enduring presence. The work by Ilana Boltvinik and Rodrigo Viñas, who together form TRES, bridges art and research, focusing on global patterns of discard and transformation through photographs, visual poetry, mimicry, and humor.
The exhibition, presented in both English and Spanish, documents TRES’s 2016 journey along the beaches of Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania, where they collected and photographed varied debris that had washed up from places as far away as China. Their images, many presented in macro scale, evoke archaeology, marine biology, and cartography, inviting viewers to ponder the natural landscapes and the stark, unnatural objects scattered across them. Some of the plastic objects, collected and cataloged by TRES, are mounted like jewels in an exhibition case along with marine specimens of Bryozoa and mollusks collected by Harvard scientists on other expeditions—inviting visitors to imagine the objects and marine specimens existing side by side along the world’s beaches.
On the walls, visitors will encounter glowing orbs resembling celestial spheres—transformed bottle caps scarred by Bryozoa micro-organisms—as well as hand-drawn maps and charts, postcards, and archival images. These artworks challenge us to find order amidst chaos, showcasing disconcerting objects like discarded shoe leather resembling a three-eyed monster head, a dislocated plastic doll’s leg, and a rubber glove missing its fingertips.
Ilisa Barbash, the Peabody Museum’s curator of visual anthropology, said, “The task of the Robert Gardner Fellows in Photography is to explore the human condition anywhere in the world, and what could be more telling about humans than their trash? The garbage of peoples of the past has long been a subject of investigation for archaeologists! By collecting and photographing the debris of contemporary societies, some of which have traveled a long way across oceans, TRES highlights the global impact that local litter can have. Yet, rather than producing a simple diatribe about the environment, TRES plays with the sizes, shapes, and colors of familiar castaway items, inviting us to see their beauty and attempt to make sense of them—leaving us a bit disoriented. What we do learn is that trash is ubiquitous. TRES’s work compels us to confront the traces of human-made pollution in ostensibly pristine environments. By examining these castaways of our culture, the exhibition fosters critical reflection on environmental and cultural sustainability.”
The art collective TRES was named to the Peabody Museum’s Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography in 2016, awarded to photographers to “document the human condition anywhere in the world.” The fellowship supported the continuation of TRES’s Ubiquitous Trash marine debris project, a book, and an exhibition.
“This exhibition, which explores what happens when human detritus encounters the natural world, and vice versa, has allowed us to work with our partners at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology,” said Jane Pickering, William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum. “MCZ generously loaned us specimens and images from their collections. It’s a wonderful example of how science and art can be combined in a meaningful way.”
The exhibition will remain on view through April 6, 2026.
