a pLASTIC tEA pARTY




Club Plastic April 5, 2025

Italiano

A pLASTIC tEA pARTY is a project to explore modes and cultures of recreation. It is designed as a social experiment in leisurely idleness, in the form of a gathering ritual to share time that was not, and cannot, be filled with anything other than sharing time.

The concept was inspired by a practice of presence and inaction named ‘the boring hour’: time spent just being, doing nothing – based on the belief that pausing, without chores, entertainment, nor distractions, is worthwhile in and of itself. The desire to host convivial boring hours gave birth to a pLASTIC tEA pARTY.

The gatherings’ aesthetic paradigm is inspired by research around two mundane, domestic objects: a teapot and carpets made of plastic, which I first encountered during a Fulani dinner in Ghana (the Fulani are a nomadic group of the Sahel region).

These objects, familiar and foreign at the same time, sparked a reflection on the coexistence of different meanings within a given form, even when this form is fundamentally functional. The common form of a teapot, for example, can be used in a variety of social and cultural situations and practices: to serve tea, in either a convivial or ceremonial setting, to carry drinking water, in places where drinking water isn’t readily available, to wash one’s hands before a meal, for example at a Fulani dinner, or for ritual ablutions before prayer, where water infrastructure isn’t in place.

In a pLASTIC tEA pARTY, I chose to emphasise this functional and — by extension — symbolic plasticity through the material plasticity of the objects within the gathering. The party becomes an opportunity for a play on a quintessentially human impulse: giving meaning to objects through the moments they are associated with — historical or lived, exceptional or quotidian, past, future, enjoyed, suffered, anticipated, feared.

a pLASTIC tEA pARTY for Club Plastic


When Andrea Ratti first invited me to host a pLASTIC tEA pARTY at Club Plastic, I accepted enthusiastically and then immediately despaired of making the conscious idleness of the former fit with the energy and vitality of the latter. Ultimately, I understood that both represent gathering and recreational rituals, suspended time, really, separated from the everyday through a particular experience of the present, as an end in itself. Their contrast, then, is a poetic oxymoron.

The first pLASTIC tEA pARTY, hosted at the Boxing Gallery last winter, was conceptually linked to the mystique of artist Daniel Spoerri’s snare pictures and his Anecdoted Topography of Chance — a body of works deeply intent in capturing time through things. This iteration, reflecting upon the insights of apparent contradictions, recalls John Giorno’s poem Welcoming the Flowers, better known, perhaps, in the form of the silk-screen prints series Perfect Flowers.

The fundamentally Buddhist worldview of the poem matches the contemplative nature of the boring hour, while its pop, bold, romantic and sensual sensibility evokes the energy of a night at the club. The coexistence of these two modalities of existence is characteristic of Giorno’s personal life. His art is infused with the wisdom he extracted from it.

Through a plastic fil rouge, the reference to John Giorno is further a nod to Andy Warhol’s synesthetic happenings Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), during which he screened his experimental films, among them Sleep – a six hours and a half montage of scenes of Giorno (by then his ex lover) asleep.

In EPI’s spirit of artistic dialogue across media and registers, this tea party also features a hand painted poster by Ghanian street sign artist Heavy Jay. His work belongs to a Ghanian tradition of commercial art focused on the production of promotional posters and commercial signs, born in the ‘70s at a time when consumer culture in the country was developing faster than the marketing industry could automate.

This genre and its influence on the urban landscape was an important influence on Ghanian modernism, for example in the work of Atta Kwame, as well as the contemporary turn towards institutional critique and anti-colonial stance of karî'kachä seid’ou (who began his career as a commercial street sign artist and is today the head of one of the most renowned fine arts academic programs on the African continent).

There is a curious, if asymmetric, parallelism between these developments and the evolution of Pop art, also influenced by consumer culture but inspired by the automation of advertising and the standardization of that visual language, rather than its craft form.

Just like the ‘teapot’ form, then, a multitude of ideas and references, from a variety of places, stories, philosophies and artistic practices, coexist within a pLASTIC tEA pARTY for club Plastic. This polyphonic blend only aims to raise one question, though: what is the relation between meaning, time, and objects?