Jordi Canal-Soler (Barcelona, 1977) looks at a map and sees things that other people cannot see. “All of this is the Polynesian triangle, which is very large. From New Zealand to Easter Island, Hawaii... These are giant distances. We see a very large sea, but the local peoples saw communication routes. As if they were highways on the sea,” he says. “I really like the entire era of explorations. When Captain James Cook sailed here to understand the world, he was one of the first Westerners to reach many of these islands. And he discovered that all of them, even though we're talking about the largest expanse of water on the planet, shared the same culture. The language and way of life are similar, as if they were the Romance languages of here. That is to say, the local peoples navigated these waters,” he explains.

Easter Island, the remote little piece of land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is caught in an oceanic plastic vortex. According to municipal data from Rapa Nui – the local name – this island receives about fifty times more plastics and microplastics than the coasts of Chile. This is largely due to its location in the South Pacific Gyre, which carries trash from Australia, South America and also from fishing boats. "The microplastic we find on the coasts is not ours," explains Moiko Pakomio, a marine biologist with the local government, who adds that worldwide the majority of microplastics come from fishing boats that dump their waste into the ocean. "This plastic waste decomposes as it travels through the currents and degrades until it becomes microplastics," she says.