If in Romania today you buy a bottle of juice or rolls and buns you will not get a bag, while in a supermarket you will probably have to pay for it. Until recently, any goods in the countries of the "Eastern Europe" were considered to be so valuable that everybody carried around simple net-bags all the time. In our country, at the time, a nice bag was the matter of prestige; therefore it was neatly stacked up in wardrobes together with the rest of clothing. A good strong plastic bag was much more in than the most expensive school bag. The bag rustled for you about the places you visited and shops in which you made your purchases; the bag was transmitting information on your standard and taste. We may suppose that the present mass consumption of billion simplest plastic bags over here resulted from such different consumer’s experiences.

The bags today are available always and everywhere. Therefore they are piled up in specialized home waste disposal sites, in pigeon-holes of kitchen elements and in drawers, or in some place suitable for putting bags aside, in some dead angle, or simply behind radiators. And they are piled up on the municipal waste disposal sites, for instance in Grocka, from where, during certain seasons, the southeast wind called košava from time to time moves them like flocks of birds back to the City, to their concrete litter.

Some people already got an idea and started making of these bags – what else but – market bags; two or three hundreds of plastic bags are built into such a multicoloured bag, in which you can put as many things as in two plastic bags. Just like in the case of production of a bag in which two hundred bags are standing in for two bags, this tent*, too, in a way stands in for two bags on citizens’ heads under the rain. These proportions are strange and threatening: in order to reduce the pollution produced by plastic matters that do not dissolve before eight decades have passed, regardless of any inventiveness or chemistry, it is sufficient to use only two plastic bags for a waterproof cap, instead of a couple of thousand of bags that Su needed for building this tent. It is quite clear that a plastic bag on one’s head is not as comfortable protection from the stormy weather as a tent. Nevertheless, the logics and the quantity of material and work interwoven and invested here, the ratio between functionality of each component’s unit and the final result, in an unpleasant manner remind of the painstaking handwork that will have to be put into unpolluting of the environment. Let us say that, after moving over fences, wires, antennas and trimmed trees, those plastic bags start to dissolve, each of them into ten or hundred pieces. In order to collect the remains of just one half-dissolved bag we will have to – threatened by the competent EU Commission – make up to one hundred of those thoughtless movements that we made when taking the bags from salesmen. Su is telling it in a nice way, characteristic for artists.

*Su Tomesen planned to produce a tent out of plastic bags but later she decided to make the Color Bar installation (see picture)

Su Tomesen

Su Tomesen(1970) is a visual artist from the Netherlands, based in Amsterdam. Originally a cultural historian, Su Tomesen has an M.A. from the University of Utrecht. She worked as a director and a researcher for television companies like the Dutch IKON and MTV Europe. She obtained a Master in Fine Arts from the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam in 2005. Her work consists of videos, installations and interventions in public space. The installations originate from the context of the location where the presence of, and interactivity with the audience plays an important role. Her videos and photos are shot in cities in the Netherlands, Japan, Egypt, Cuba and Brazil. The notion of ‘identity’, people’s behaviour, architecture and the design of public space are topics in her work. With her recent works and projects Godot in Cuba, Oscarland, Parade, Lieve, Tourist-terrorist she participated in the exhibitions and festivals such as the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Kunstvlaai 6 Amsterdam, DVD-collection Capricious NYC, Laptopia Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, W139 Amsterdam and the Akbank festival Istanbul.