“I pick up everything I can,” says Longobardi, “I think every single piece you can pick up is that one last piece. That one is not going to hurt something, you know?” Longobardi, a Distinguished University Professor of Art at Georgia State University and Founder of the Drifters Project, incorporates objects she finds during beach cleanups into her art installations. She found layers of significance in the plastic beach we encountered:
“You’re looking at a crime against nature here.
So I want to bring these things back and show people and see what messages they might bring.
Like, what can we learn from this stuff? Who’s living on it? Who bit it?
Where’d it come from? What text can be read on it? Is there a message in the irony of it?”