Bioplastics Cookbook for Ritual Healing from Petrochemical Landscapes

The Bioplastics Cookbook for Ritual Healing from Petrochemical Landscapes refigures materials and methods for radically remaking the historically dominant petrochemically derived plastic materials that we use in our everyday lives. This online DIY recipe and storybook envisions tactics for reclaiming, rebuilding, and healing from the extractive and destructive processes of techno-capitalism by using renewable biological materials and open-sourcing these alternative processes, urging for a collective shift in our material relationships. The project is informed by the Additivist Cookbook by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke, and Allahyari’s concept of »refiguring« as a decolonial practice.

This online book catalogues DIY protocols that can be done in homes or guerrilla kitchens to create bioplastics and materials from accessible and renewable ingredients such as agar agar, starch, glycerin, natural pigments, and food waste. These recipes and their results are documented online as text, photography, and video. Additionally, the Bioplastics Cookbook for Ritual Healing from Petrochemical Landscapes interweaves stories and images about materials and mythologies, such as the entanglements of plastiglomerate and the Hawaiian volcano goddess Pele, and nonhuman species such as Larvaceans, who filter microplastics from our oceans.

The processes and forms in the cookbook aim to create a space for ritual healing from the trauma of the Extractocene (a term from artist Praba Pilar), while transforming the poisoning of earth into material rituals for rebirth and renewal.