Getting by With the Irreparable: Following the Traces of Plastic Oceans[Faire monde avec l’irréparable. Sur les traces des océans de plastique]

In fifteen years, the problem of plastic waste in oceans has turned into an alarming symbol of the global ecological crisis. Invisible by its microscopic nature, the phenomenon has become a public problem trough a dramatic iconography depicting some deadly damages linked with the omnipresence of leftovers in these vast and particularly remote areas. The "plastic continent" metaphor also attended to unite a wide variety of actors around questing solutions to clean the oceans. But is it only desirable to "repair the world"? To what extent are these large cleaning projects as problematic as those that seem able to justify them? In the absence of technically viable cleaning up solution, some people try to sublimate these traces of the current disaster to give pause for thought to the overland origins of this plastic invasion and to experiment new ways of inhabiting the world with leftovers.