This project documents life in Plastic City, a Venezuelan refugee settlement on the outskirts of Lethem, Guyana, near the Brazilian border. Established about a decade ago on land designated by the Guyanese government, residents built homes from plastic, wood, and discarded materials, giving the settlement its name. Today, around 500 people live here, many from the Warau and Eñepa Indigenous communities who walked for weeks from the Orinoco delta in eastern Venezuela or the Venezuelan Amazon to northern Brazil, and then to Guyana. More than half of the residents are children.

The residents of Plastic City, like many refugees, live in a state of limbic anxiety. They are prevented by the Guyanese government from going more than a few kilometres away from Lethem and Plastic City, but are also prohibited from setting down permanent roots in the settlement.

The experience of these Warau and Eñepa families raises questions that are pertinent across South America and parts of the Caribbean. How is indigeneity renegotiated in a border zone, where a community is trapped in a sort of political purgatory? And what does the notion of home mean for a community that is being forced to create a new one so far from the region they have called home for hundreds of years?

The experience of Plastic City’s inhabitants is not just one of precarity and displacement, but one in which a community is being forced to reconstitute itself and the relationship it has with the notions of home and landscape. Here, the relationship with the territory that is the setting of daily life is no longer ancestral; inhabitants of Plastic City have been forced to improvise, to try to create the foundation of their new home from the residue of another society. Within this improvisational, reconstructive act lies this project’s central concern: the ways in which people facing such dire circumstances piece together not only a place to call home, but also lives that are full, which contain the whole spectrum of human emotions, including tenderness, intimacy, and joy.