The fetishisation of the mundane, the tension between normality and dystopia, attractiveness and disgust.

Something so banal and familiar as a cup of tea, trapped in plastic, organic looking, like some sort of biological fluid, stretched and hanged like skin, a piece of meat that becomes some sort of holy item, elevated and sanctified, held in chains as in some sort of kinky, fetishistic practice.

We are entirely surrounded by plastic, or better, WE surround ourselves with it. Plastic is the symbol of artificiality, a man-made prosthetic addition to what is already there. The production process of the material itself involves treating raw materials with heat to refine them into a final product that is incredibly durable. However, although this product is exceptionally resistant over time, the marketing tendency is to link it to a “single-use” employment. Often, the way this long-lasting matter is disposed of is by burning it. Like exaggerated synthetic packagings that present products, plastic is often unnecessary but so normalised in everyday life; it coats food, bottles up water, and transforms natural elements in consumable goods. Plastic becomes therefore a symbol of human constructs, which build themselves on narratives and belief systems that add layers and layers of cultural connotations to what is objectively there.

Tea also possesses strong connotations that changed drastically over time, due to its complex history. Many cultures associate this drink to ritualistic customs that get attributed to what, in the end, is just water, mixed (again involving heat as a transformative agent) with plants.

Narratives, contracts, attributes, connotations, all establish idolatry for symbols; fetishisation blends the border between what is attractive and what isn't, what is revered and what is secular, inevitably resulting in a collection of contradictions.

A consumption of products, images, and ideas, a shifted human perception, a tea bag that has nothing to do with the its commonly perceived appearance.