Material Empathy is a humanistic ethos that runs throughout Viet Ngo’s longstanding practice: the belief that materials are not inert matter, but possess their own spirit, intention, and life.
The video simply captures, in close-up, plastic pellets rattling intensely along a conveyor belt, immediately after emerging from the incineration and recycling process of plastic waste. The sound of the pellets in motion merges with the characteristic white noise of machinery within the production facility.
In this minimalist work, we are compelled to look closely and listen carefully, to establish a connection with a material that is at once familiar and strange. To understand a material is the first step toward a symbiotic process of creation, in which the material’s life cycle becomes a crucial axis of both the work’s aesthetics and its conceptual framework. The artwork, in turn, participates in the creative process as a form of “co-authorship.”
Plastic pellets are among the by-products of the waste-treatment process at Vietstar.
