Luzinterruptus creates a “labyrinth” of plastic waste for new installation

Luzinterruptus, the anonymous art collective, have launched their latest installation featuring a “labyrinth” of plastic waste at Madrid’s Plaza Mayor. The team were invited by the Madrid City Council to participate in the 4th Centennial Celebration of Plaza Mayor within the Four Seasons art program.

As an extension of a public art project the studio completed for Poland’s Katowice Street Art Festival in 2014, the piece is “larger and more claustrophobic” than before. With roughly 15,0000 bottles making up the structure, the installation was built using a month’s worth of plastic bottles “that had been consumed in the square,” says Luzinterruptus. “The idea was to graphically visualise the amount of plastic we generate in our daily lives which we do not often recycle accordingly. As a consequence, all this plastic is dumped in nature and ends up floating in the ocean, forming huge plastic islands that are destroying the marine ecosystem and will never decompose.”

“We thought it was paramount that the piece did not look friendly,” says the collective. Centred around the Plaza’s statue of King Philip III, the structure was built with an “intricate path and narrow passages which forces visitors to keep turning.” At 170 metres in length and three metres tall, the walls have been designed to provoke feelings of “disorientation” and “unease.”

The demand for plastics is expected to double in the next 20 years, according to an Ellen MacArthur Foundation report. “In a business-as-usual scenario, the ocean is expected to contain one tonne of plastic for every three tonnes of fish by 2025, and by 2050, more plastics than fish [by weight],” the report says.

Luzinterruptus hopes that “things change soon” and that recycling services begin to consider the possibility of collecting these materials more selectively. “With the defective outdated system currently in place, this seems mission impossible.”