Body # 9 explores the intersections of gender, body politics, and the poetics of materiality within the expanded field of Sex Ecologies. With roots in the Mono-Ha movement where a response to materiality is shared. This body of work unravels and shares a culmination of four years of research, collaborations, interactions, and experiments.

This ongoing project examines the entanglement of bodies, ecology, and agency through permeability and protection. Drawing from Elvia Wilk’s assertion that health depends on regulating what enters and exits the body’s borders, this research explores how biological, political, and ecological systems shape our evolving relationship with plastics. Building on previous research conducted along the Tennessee River,one of the most microplastic-polluted rivers in the world, this project expands its inquiry to local, regional and global geographies positioned between ancient histories and contemporary crises of plastic presence.

Inspired by works such as Stefanie Hessler’s Sex Ecologies and the multidisciplinary research of The Synthetic Collective, this project investigates plastic’s presence within bodies and landscapes, considering how human and more-than-human life negotiate contamination and adaptation. It reflects on methodologies such as remote sensing microplastic research conducted by Heidi Dierssen in collaboration with NASA and artist Oskar Landi, as well as the socio-political implications of plastic pollution in Greek waters.

Through site-responsive research, collaboration, and material experimentation, the project synthesizes Athens’ relationship with plastic waste, tourism economies, and environmental policies. Using sculpture, video, sound, and text, the work situates itself within ecopoetics and queer aesthetics, challenging binaries between natural and synthetic, inside and outside, self and other. The project proposes plastic as a material archive, one that records environmental degradation but also embodies resilience, entanglement, and transformation.