Melia Efstratis Chendo
Plastic, 2025
Plastic (2024-25) is a durational performance piece that experiments with the body as spectacle in public space. Chendo has performed various iterations of Plastic in New York and Berlin, always accompanied by an other -- a camera and its seeing subject. Archival footage from previous activations of Plastic culminated in Signs of Material (2025), Chendo’s audiovisual installation and senior BA thesis exhibition at NYU Gallatin. Plastic was originally recorded as a public performance and video art piece for Lyle Ashton Harris’s Spring 2024 course “Interdisciplinary Proj: Photo/Video, Performance/Installation” at NYU Steinhardt’s studio art program. Chendo also incorporated this gesture in their performance with Harris at MoMA (2025). Documentation of the public Berlin performance, spanning several miles from Megan Rosengarten’s apartment to Jackson King’s sound studio, is used here in digital assemblages (video stills and text).
In each work, the walk is set in motion by the city and the presence of the camera, and at the same time, occluded by plastic. Layers of texturized video, audio, and material destabilize the image of the subject as the performer’s body is saran wrapped, matted, and compressed into object. The authority of the onlooker’s gaze is called into question; the plastic body refuses definition, clarity, and coherence. Plastic, here, becomes enigmatic material-- the incommunicable, repressed material left behind in the subject, beyond conscious perception or embodiment of social codes.
Photos by Megan Rosengarten