MY LITTLE TRAGEDY

My Little Tragedy is a participatory video installation centred on a weathered pink toy pony recovered from debris washed ashore on Terschelling following the 2019 MSC Zoe container spill in the Wadden Sea. Displayed on a four-metre-wide screen, the pony addresses visitors directly, recounting its journey from ocean floor to shoreline, and from petrochemical origins to plastic afterlife. Over thirteen minutes, an intimate monologue builds into something stranger and more uncomfortable: a karaoke celebration of plastic, in which visitors are invited to sing along.

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The work moves through several emotional registers, disorientation, quiet revelation, evangelical warmth, before arriving at a participatory sequence where visitors gather around a microphone and perform a collective inventory of plastic objects. The singing is genuinely fun. The discomfort arrives slowly, then all at once: the chorus refers to the five grams of microplastics entering the average human body each week. When the lights cut to black, the room loops to underwater documentary footage of debris recovery, and the sequence begins again.

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The pony’s philosophy frames plastic’s spread not as damage but as destiny, a form of intimacy. This warmth is precisely what implicates the audience.