From the make-up, soaps, and birth control pills in your bathroom to plastic packaging in your kitchen, beauty, hygiene, and lifestyle products in the average home cater to a consumerist culture driven by ideals of beauty, sterility, and purity. In actuality, these everyday items leach a multitude of pervasive chemicals that wend their way through our bodies, environments, and urban systems, disrupting hormones of all species and causing ecological threat to our landscapes. Obscured to us through their invisible size, and also by the conglomerates who lay havoc on the earth to sell us these products, micro-polluting chemicals are part of today’s stark reality of living in toxic worlds. Mary Maggic’s “Estroworld Now: The Quarantine Edition” (2021) invites users to navigate 3D model renderings of the interior of an actual suburban home in the North-West of England. The work is part of The Estroworld, a fictional corporate conglomerate of petrochemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries whose products and molecular residues are simply inescapable. In The Quarantine Edition, visitors are confronted with an overpopulation of Estroworld products, pop ups, and derivative company slogans, that promise to either shield or distract us from our current state of planetary ruin. Are we all already living in The Estroworld? How political is your shampoo?
