MEXICAN COKE
MEXICAN COKE IN AMERICA
vs. MEXICAN COKE IN MEXICO, 2026 CE
26 glass Coke bottles in vitrine.
00 x 00 x 00 inches
This work comes back to a pretty simple but difficult concern: the desire to create alongside the desire to do so without causing harm. Every object comes out of larger systems of extraction, energy use, and waste, and in this body of work I’ve been using a strategy of identification to connect materials to landscapes. When I began working with this object, I initially approached it through that same lens, but realized the more urgent story here wasn’t its material inventory, but the system it moves through.
I brought this familiar, everyday object into the work to expand the scope of the project beyond materials used in art making, and into those we encounter in everyday life. The concerns I have in the studio aren’t separate, they mirror those of someone doing a weekly grocery shop.
Formally, the work consists of twenty-five empty refillable Coca-Cola bottles arranged in repetition alongside a single broken bottle. The number references the average reuse cycle in Mexico, around twenty-five uses, while the shattered bottle represents the fate of most glass containers once they enter the United States’ linear waste system. Instead of critiquing individual American consumers, the project examines how alternative material systems already exist within global industry. In markets like Mexico, Coca-Cola’s refillable bottle systems show that reuse can work, with collection rates up to 93%.
I think of this piece less as a critique and more as an example. It shows that large-scale reuse isn’t hypothetical, it already exists. What it reveals is that the problem isn’t a lack of solutions, but which systems are prioritized and sustained. In that sense, the work becomes a way of making that difference visible, holding up two material logics side by side and asking what it would mean to take the circular one seriously, both in everyday life and in the studio.
