Ballet Mécanique (1924) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy

Try to be free: you will die of hunger. Society tolerates you only if you are successively servile and despotic; it is a prison without guards—but from which you do not escape without dying [...] In the end, you stay there like everyone else, pretending to busy yourself; you convince yourself of this extremity by the resources of artifice, since it is less absurd to simulate life than to live it.

Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay

Bridget Riley, Unnoscriptd (Study for Blaze), 1962

Coffee, Edward Hopper, 1955

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)

The more we make, the more we waste. But this ‘we’ isn’t universal. It relies on exclusion and exploitation – dynamics glossed as ‘externalities’ by the institutions of predatory capitalism and the economists who legitimise their actions. Since 1950, industry has produced more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic. Of this, 6.4 billion tonnes have ended up as waste, the vast majority originating in rich countries. Only 9 per cent of this total has been ‘recycled’; another 12 per cent has been incinerated. The rest has gone to landfills, or been left to its own devices. The cheapest of these plastics cannot be recycled at all; abandoned, the materials break down into microplastics, leaching persistent organic pollutants along the way. The ethos of endless growth is nurtured daily by the idea of disposability, and by media reports of expanding economies (good) or stagnating ones (bad). It’s a fantasy that feeds on twin figments: the planet is infinite, and discards disappear.

Gabrielle Hecht, ‘The idea of ‘disposability’ is a new and noxious fiction

Hand-made forms by Gwilym Thomas, 1973.

Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) by director Walter Ruttmann

The Exterminating Angel (1962), dir. Luis Buñuel