Jan Černý

The basis of the work is plaster castings of plastic packaging of various products, which we encounter every day.

This disposable packaging protects our electronics (light bulbs, headphones, microphone), daily necessities (wall hooks, batteries, WC block), or food (lunch box, box of chocolates, biscuits). However, once it fulfills its sole purpose, it is usually thrown away.

While observing the shapes of these plastic moldings, I realized that they have unique forms — sometimes openly, sometimes subtly customized to their content — and I decided to materialize this secondary shape by plaster casting.

I then digitized these castings using a 3D scanner and, through a computer-generated layout, created a large map consisting only of the inverse shapes of long-discarded packages. We see a strange landscape of more or less familiar forms.

Although I did not initially create the work with ecological appeal in mind, the question arose: isn’t there a similar landscape somewhere in the ocean?

The title is a Czech–English wordplay between “oddity” and “odlitek” (cast).