He is an artist who dedicates all his work to plastic, to show it to us, to show us this omnipresent material in our daily lives. Ben von Wong, 35, is Canadian. He only makes his sculptures from used plastic, and if we talk about him today it’s because his major work, Plastic Tap (“the plastic tap”), thrones at the entrance of the World Summit against plastic pollution which currently brings together 193 nations, under the aegis of the UN, in Nairobi, Kenya. Visitors and stakeholders are therefore greeted by this huge tap which spits out a cascade of bottles, a tub of ice cream, a tube of toothpaste, various packaging, which pours into a large puddle several meters above the ground, suggesting that it would be enough to settle the problem of “turn off the tap”.
The expression was taken up verbatim by the chair of the World Summit on Plastic Pollution, Inger Andersen, the director of the UN environment programme, who calls on world leaders to “turn off the tap”. And there is urgency. According to the OECD, 91% of this waste escapes any recycling and above all, the production of plastic has quadrupled over the past thirty years to reach 460 million tonnes per year. Millions of tons that don’t disappear and whose persistence has become Ben von Wong’s number one obsession. “First of allexplains the artist to Picture This magazine, I discovered that a plastic continent was floating in the Pacific. I inquired, I accumulated mountains of terrifying information, and obviously, once you start to see, you can no longer act as if you don’t know..”
He who, until now, took photos without a specific goal, therefore decided to use his talent to raise awareness, to challenge, to shock. He first made a monumental work with straws picked up on beaches, 168,030 straws forming a huge wave. Then, he built a giant wardrobe with 3,000 clothes to denounce disposable fashion. “But all these projectshe said, only dealt with the individual impact, not the root cause of the problem, the source which is plastic production.”
So he made his plastic tap and moved on to another level, exhibiting in Montreal, Paris, and today, in Nairobi, a few kilometers from one of the largest landfills in the world. Ben von Wong now hopes that this Summit will give birth to the first treaty limiting the production of plastic. And, good news, it’s on the right track.