Maria Islands depicts a speculative scenario where the Philippines adapts to a world shaped by plastic waste exported to the archipelago by Western nations.

For years, shipments of foreign waste have made Southeast Asia a dumping ground — a place where wealthier countries can forget what they discard. Some of that waste drifts into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where ocean currents gather it into a mass that has, in its own way, become an island. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii, the first plastiglomerate was discovered: a fusion of sand, shell, rock and plastic proposed as a stratigraphic marker of human activity written directly into the earth.

From these conditions the project builds a fictional archipelago made of plastic debris, watched over by a techno-deity named Maria, who tends to the islands and brings to life new species evolved for a life with plastic. The work asks what tools, cultures, technologies and ecologies might emerge in such a place and proposes a scenario in which the Philippines turns the waste sent to it into expanded national territory.

The exhibitions based on this narrative framework were produced in collaboration with Dutch artist Erik Peters.