The Ambivalent Plasticity of Plastics

Plastics in Humanitarian Borderlands

In Colombia’s humanitarian borderlands, plastic is more than a matter of convenience: it shapes shelters, mediates medical care, and marks paths through minefields. Plastics enter these landscapes as provisional and disposable objects, as the very vocabulary of humanitarian design, and then endure, accumulate, and are repurposed, folded back into everyday life. Across these registers, plastics generate a form of future-making that is neither wholly emancipatory nor purely destructive but profoundly ambivalent. 

This ambivalence sits uneasily with the dominant narrative arcs around plastic. As Anand Pandian suggests, plastic in the Plasticene embodies both “utopian hope and deep despair”1: the capacity to imagine otherwise and the impossibility of escaping the infrastructures we have made. Yet between these poles lies something less dramatic: what people practice daily as a patient re-design with the materials at hand.

Following Catherine Malabou, this can be approached through the concept of plasticity: the capacity to receive form and to give form, to endure transformation while generating rupture.2 Plasticity here is not mere flexibility or resilience, but a material-temporal force that reshapes relations without escaping the structures in which they unfold. The plasticity of plastic is more than etymological coincidence. Plastic, the material, and plasticity, the concept, share a capacity to hold and release form: the tarp stretched and retied, the caution tape laid and lifted, the hospital table reshaped for new use. In plastics, plasticity becomes tangible.

Attending to plastics’ plasticity reframes how we understand humanitarian design. Most humanitarian aid items are made of polymers: they are easy to mold into standardized shapes, offer some weather resistance, and are lightweight, which makes them logistically easier to deploy from one crisis area to another. Where dominant accounts treat humanitarian objects as either instruments of aid or residues of intervention, plastics actively mediate the conditions of dwelling, caring, and desiring in landscapes structured by violence, neglect, and humanitarian presence, even as they sediment colonial flows of pollution and harm.3 

Across the Gulf of Urabá and Norte de Santander, in settlement and housing, plastics mediate endurance: tarpaulins transform temporary shelters into durational infrastructure. In infrastructures of care, plastics enable circulation of medical attention while indexing scarcity. In regimes of mobility, plastics trace desire lines, marking safe passage while inscribing risk. Together, these practices reveal plastics as active mediators of ambivalent future-making. They show humanitarian design itself as a field in which the boundary between waste and resource, harm and care, is continuously, materially renegotiated.

Precarious Presents: Green Tarps and Plasticity in Necoclí’s 9 de Abril Settlement

In May 2025, a violent storm swept through 9 de Abril, a self-built settlement on the outskirts of Necoclí, on the Gulf of Urabá. Typhoon-strength winds ripped away fragile roofs, shredded walls, and splintered wooden frames, exposing the limits of the settlement’s material endurance. A few days later, the settlement had become a fragmented, “patchy” landscape, where provisional shelters assembled from salvaged materials stood as fragile claims to place.4 Although the municipal authorities (the Alcaldía) coordinated emergency relief, 9 de Abril’s status as an informal settlement left its residents outside of official support systems. In this gap, repair depended on improvisation with what was at hand.

In the wake of the storm, Edixon, a young resident, showed me his home: damp mattresses resting on a raised wooden platform to stay above ground, covered by overlapping green tarps anchored to sticks, all scavenged near the beach. “It’s provisional,” he said with a resigned smile, “but everything here is provisional.”5 The tarps stood in sharp contrast to the wood and textiles that made up the rest of the shelter. While the wooden frames and worn fabrics bore the marks of time and fragility, the plastic tarps stretched taut and vibrant, their synthetic durability and malleability offering a tense promise of protection. Yet this promise is never stable. The tarps must be retied and adjusted after each gust of wind. They hold, but only through constant recalibration.

This material contrast is revealing. Wood and textiles evoke a naturalness that slowly decays and dissolves organically. Plastic, by contrast, is paradoxical: it is synthetic and designed for durability, yet vulnerable to tearing and displacement. While disposable plastics are culturally framed as ephemeral and transient, producing what Gay Hawkins calls a “temporality of presentism,” “barely there before they are gone,” the green tarps in 9 de Abril persist through storms, are continuously adjusted, and structure everyday life.6 They are not passive coverings, but actively mediate between exposure and shelter. Here, Malabou’s notion of plasticity as the capacity to give and receive form illuminates the tarps’ double movement: they receive the force of wind and rain, stretching under pressure, while simultaneously giving form to the shelter, holding a fragile present together while opening a path toward uncertain futures.

9 de Abril settlement, Urabá, Antioquia.

In a nearby house, another family layered advertising banners over their roof, cutting and overlapping the sheets so that water runs toward a single improvised gutter. Each addition anticipates the next leak. The roof is not rebuilt, but incrementally extended. These gestures do not secure permanence. They stretch and stabilize, buying time without guaranteeing it. Plastic’s durability conserves form just long enough for everyday life to continue, while never fully overcoming exposure.

This dynamic speaks to a deeper ethico-political ambivalence between shelter and abandonment. The green tarps evoke a fragile kind of protection, a makeshift infrastructure standing in for absent formal support. Their bright, synthetic surfaces mark the settlement’s precarious visibility: a patchwork of provisional shelters that simultaneously provide cover and hint at ongoing neglect. They materialize emergency made permanent, inscribing 9 de Abril into a landscape where care and abandonment coexist. Plasticity here is the labor of stabilizing everyday life while anticipating further disruption.

Plastic in 9 de Abril is both excessive and scarce. While it litters gutters and riverbanks as a symptom of environmental degradation, every usable scrap is reclaimed and folded into circuits of repair. Plastic waste and plastic infrastructure fold into one another: discarded sheets become roofing, advertising banners become walls, debris becomes shelter. Plasticity is not an abstract property but a situated practice. It is temporal orientation embedded in knots, overlaps, and weighted corners. Repairs are made with the next storm in mind. Anticipation becomes material.

Emerging amid fragmented state support and uneven humanitarian logics, the tarps enable forms of endurance. Their durability buys time: time to dry mattresses, to reinforce beams, to negotiate with municipal authorities. In doing so, they sustain the minimal stability from which residents assert presence and insist on recognition, or at least support. What futures emerge here are not projected in grand visions but assembled through incremental adjustments.7 Plastic mediates ambivalent futurity: it preserves continuity while acknowledging instability. The green tarps, though temporary, signify more than shelter. They are infrastructural gestures, material acts that extend structures into uncertain futures while maintaining minimal stability. 

White Tables and the Plastic Care of the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Pamplona 

Carlos Rozo, director of human talent at the hospital San Juan de Dios in Pamplona, is deeply committed to providing the kind of care the Colombian health care system requires. It is “the best in the world,” one that “covers everyone, equally.” Living up to the commitment, however, is challenging. It requires ingenuity and imagination. At the entrance to the public emergency ward, a color-coded explanation of the “triage” system testifies to the technologies used to diminish the pressure on the hospital. Around the corner is an alternative—privately constructed and operated—emergency ward that further alleviates the pressure. Of a handful of ambulances parked in front of the building, only two are functional. A third is on loan to Cùcuta, where 50,000 internally displaced persons arrived from Catatumbo in early 2025. Even if all seven ambulances had been available, they could hardly cover the vast area within the hospital’s mandate. Much of the “territorio” is inaccessible by road or becomes so when it rains. For the director, this is business as usual. 

The precarity is aggravated by the scars on hospital finances left by the difficulty of obtaining compensation for treatments generally and particularly for Venezuelans. “Obviously, we have always treated everyone.” “No,” the international humanitarians did not provide any support for the treatment of the people they referred to the hospital. “No,” they did not leave any equipment. Yes, the international humanitarians did leave a deep wound in the hospital budget that is slow to heal. “Creativity,” the director repeatedly and emphatically insists, has been the key to continued care. He recalls the complicated turns taken to bring a pregnant Venezuelan teenager in need of specialized treatment to the hospital in Cùcuta. He (proudly) recounts how he reshapes and remakes the all too scarce resources of his hospital. His inventive work with the malleability of the hospital infrastructures illustrates Malabou’s point that plasticity is not only aesthetic but also “a modality of ‘physical-technological’ spaces.”8 

Facebook post, Hospital San Juan de Dios, Pamplona.

The director’s unexpected reaction to a side remark about our research on plastic made clear how central plastic was for this plasticity. Opening his laptop, Carlos Rozo enthusiastically scrolls through the hospital’s Facebook page and points to the pervasive presence of plastic in the pictures there. He recalls the legacy and leftovers of the international humanitarians:

Look here, you see this is a plastic table… This one still has the OIM [Organización Internacional para las Migraciones] label.… This is an odontological chair. It is light. It is plastic.… That box. It is a cooling box. We use it for medicines and vaccines.… You see this board. We use it all the time, when we go to the communities. ACNUR [Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Refugiados] left it…

The pictures we are scrolling through show hospital outreach work. They include targeted “mobile health” campaigns as well as the work of the “promotores de salud,” who, after a short crash course, promote public health care in rural areas. The sturdy, light quality of plastic makes this work possible. Plastic objects are transportable. They help the director forge a path from the very real limitations of the hospital in Pamplona to the “best health care in the world” he aims to provide. Plastics also open up different relations to humanitarian organizations. The organizations did leave important things behind. They left the plastic chairs, boxes, tables, tarps and more. The plastics afford plasticity in the sense of a “modality of passage to the otherwise.”9 An otherwise where his commitment to care comes within reach and humanitarian organizations leave more than wounds in the hospital budget.

The plasticity of the passage afforded by plastics cannot undo the pressure of precarity on the Pamplona hospital. Precarity “enters as a line that scratches, tears, slices, striates.”10 The director is in no position to wear “the tattoo of indifference to power.”11 The plasticity of plastics can only displace and decenter this precarity. But therein lies an achievement; an opening onto an anarchic care, “to be invented, to be shaped before it exists … [a care that] is never what it is.”12 No wonder the hospital director is enthused by the plastics affording such plasticity. No wonder he privileges and emphasizes the malleability of “plastic care” over the fixed, readily identifiable, oppressive structures of power that had dominated our earlier conversation. Yet, this celebration of plastic’s plasticity also leaves intact the very structures of abandonment that make such plasticity necessary for providing care in the first place.

Plastic Tapes and Desire Lines on Explosive Soils

We left for the day early, before the heat and humidity made the path too difficult. Escorted by Haivy’s dogs, we reached the zone where demining took place a few months ago. This area was a hunting and spiritual site for the Indigenous Emberá community of the Resguardo Pescadito, an Indigenous reserve in the North Chocó, Colombia, in the Darién jungle area, but became unsafe when the FARCs used it as a transit area during the conflict.13 Long after they left, the area remained inaccessible due to fear of mines. As in other Colombian borderlands, clashes between armed groups left dormant killers in the soil. 

Before demining teams arrived, knowledge on dangerous paths was passed on to younger generations through oral instructions and machete marks on trees.14 With the beginning of clearance operations, however, plastic emerges. Humanitarian teams use synthetic caution tapes to demarcate the terrain and clear it meter by meter. Versatile and lightweight, they adapt to uneven terrains, and can be assembled and dismantled easily. “Peligro, minas.” “Peligro, no Pase.”15 Colored plastic becomes a mode of alertness, making the war-torn ecology more visible.16 Yet these devices also announce the opening of a future passage; they inscribe fragile lines of desire for mobility. Not yet open, but “almost possible,” in a few months, a few weeks.

Demining teams in Colombia. © Humanity and Inclusion (HI).

Then comes the moment when the caution tapes are removed and the area is officially declared free of mines. But as the deminer’s plastic gear is carried away, something becomes clearer: even if no explosion (plastiquage, in French) occurs, there has been an accident.17 The virtuality of explosion already constitutes a rupture before any actual blast. If demining is, for sure, a life-saving achievement, the relationship to the ground has already been irreversibly altered. The ground becomes a ground that was once explosive. The ecological grief, solastalgia, remains and disorients.18 

Moreover, the inhabitants know that neighboring areas may still be contaminated. The territory is too vast to be fully cleared.  In addition, only certain mines can be cleared: the “minas sin dueños,” named as such since they no longer belong to any party to the conflict.19 Mines laid down by active armed groups cannot be removed by humanitarian actors. As a result, the fear of other plastics appearing—the plastics of prosthetic replacing a limb lost in blasts—never entirely disappears.

Thus, synthetic caution tapes open ambivalent possibilities: the imminence of passage intertwined with lingering contamination. They trace a desire for movement that is itself plastic, continually reconfiguring itself in relation to the ground. Following Malabou, the plasticity of desire “is related to its mobility (Bewegtheit), in other words, its ability to change its object, not to remain fixed, the capacity to change its investments.”20 New orientations of care and concern emerge in this shifting terrain, as Haivy reminds us, such as the desire to protect river water from upstream extraction activities, or the wish to finally complete the community’s children’s space. Affective investments are reoriented toward other parts of the reserve.

Plastic Plasticity and Humanitarian Designs 

Throughout Colombia’s borderlands, plastics do more than signify precarity. They enable dwelling, caring, and desiring amid uncertainty. They neither collapse neatly into the register of colonially conditioned waste and toxicity, nor into that of an infinitely malleable, creative resource for future making. Instead, plastics participate in a mutable politics of matter and mundane humanitarian design.

Read through Malabou, the plasticity of plastics functions as a “creative modality” that rearranges “physical-technological space,” reorients “desire” and serves as “a passage to the otherwise” while leaving the “tattoo of power” intact. In Necoclí’s 9 de Abril, overlapping green tarps stretched into provisional shelters extend fragile presents into uncertain futures, materializing emergency made permanent. In the Hospital San Juan de Dios in Pamplona, plastic medical tables, lightweight chairs, and vaccine cooling boxes left behind by international humanitarians sustain a plastic care that reaches outward to communities the state struggles to serve. In Chocó’s demining areas, vividly colored caution tapes trace desire lines toward a passage that is “almost possible,” even as the ground retains the ontology of having been explosive.

What emerges is not utopia in any redemptive sense, but what Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor calls “utopian plasticity”: a deferral, a waiting, a persistence in difference.21 Such futures remain vulnerable to being co-opted, dissolved, or overwhelmed by the very forces they momentarily resist. The plasticity of plastics cannot undo the uneven, unjust, and violent infrastructures of housing, healthcare, and land that Edixon, Carlos, and Haivy contend with. Nor can it dissolve the colonial pollution and bodily harms that plastics themselves generate.

Yet it is vital. To frame plastic only as a pollutant forecloses the possibility of seeing these other modes of plasticity. To frame it only as a resource risks romanticizing survival under duress. Attending to the endurance, care, and invention plastics enable does not celebrate them. It acknowledges the uneven and paradoxical ways they shape life, and in doing so opens space for designing humanitarian landscapes differently. Even in landscapes saturated with violence, material life is not exhausted by destruction.