La Mégisserie

This exhibition shows how our seas, our watercourses and our world are being invaded by plastic trash. It is an atrocious ecological disaster which affects us all. Little by little, the world’s oceans are becoming giant seas of plastic. Each year, more than 6.4 million metric tons of plastic waste ends up in the sea, with 80% carried there by rivers. Created by the Museum für Gestaltung design museum in Zurich, the exhibition has toured to Hong Kong, Marseille, Hamburg and Ghent before making a short stop at La Mégisserie in Saint-Junien.

A stunning exhibition showing the devastation that plastic garbage is wreaking in the world’s seas – a true ecological disaster

It is a rich and fascinating mix of flotsam, photographs, drawings, and animated films, but also sets out the consequences for both animals and human health. It helps to raise awareness of all the issues associated with this plastic marine pollution, and explains how to stop it – specifically by reusing and recycling everyday items. The exhibition is beautiful and terrible at the same time. There are birds whose stomachs are full of bottle tops in a rainbow of colors, fish who consume plastic and end up on our plates, diapers that last for 450 years before disappearing into the waves, and beaches suffocating under multicolored plastic bags. It is an exhibition that packs a punch, making the visitor realize that it is more than time to act, it is a question of survival. Here and now.

“There must be tons of plastic. There are drums, bottles, bags, nets, pipes. At the back of the hall in the Villa Méditerranée is a mountain of garbage piled on the floor, symbolic of the ecological disaster that plastic represents. It is the equivalent of the plastic discharged into the planet’s oceans in ... one minute. (...) A great deal of space is given over to the exhibition, which gives pride of place to educational, even playful, images and exhibits. They are complemented effectively by projections. This exhibition by Zurich’s Museum für Gestaltung has already visited Sweden, Spain, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Hong Kong.“