MOTHER FUCKER

Together with 99 international artists, Wumen and Ioana created one of the artist bottles MOTHERFUCKER, from 99 plastic bottles collected from the Mediterranean Sea by artist Willem de Haan in 2024 — presented at Post Pollution exhibition, at gallery Vriend van Bavink, Amsterdam.

Work title: MOTHERFUCKER
Medium: 3D print (PLA) + reclaimed PET Coca-Cola bottle from ocean

MOTHERFUCKER confronts the deceptive cycle of plastic recycling—specifically the transformation of PET bottles into r-PET fibers for the textile industry. This process, often paraded as “sustainable innovation,” is in truth a calculated act of corporate greenwashing. Rather than addressing the real challenge of textile-to-textile recycling, major fast-fashion brands divert attention by turning plastic bottle waste into garments, branding it as an environmental triumph.

A crushed Coca-Cola PET bottle leans heavily against a fragile PLA structure, visually and metaphorically transferring the weight of responsibility from powerful corporations to the end consumer—an inversion that exposes who truly bears the burden of sustainability.

MOTHERFUCKER shows a middle finger to the system that dares to call exploitation “eco-friendly.”

Visual ID design by Malin Neamtzu 

🎀Vocabulary 

PET — Polyethylene terephthalate
rPET — recycled polyethylene terephthalate

🎀Context (for those who want to go deeper):
Polyester represents ~18% of global polymer production — and PET is the dominant material for fiber manufacturing. In 2023, 57% of all fibers were PET.

Only 12.5% of those were from recycled PET — mostly bottles.

And less than 1% of textile fibers come from recycled textiles.

This means 99% of textile waste is NOT recycled back into textiles — largely due to blended fibers that resist circular recycling. The EU now pushes to reduce rPET sourced from bottles and accelerate textile-to-textile recycling, forcing a real shift in material responsibility.

🎀Reference:
Recycling processes of polyester-containing textile waste – A review
by Jana Enking et al.
MOTHERFUCKER, 3D print (PLA) + reclaimed PET Coca-Cola bottle from ocean, 2025