‘Suspensión I’, a 2019 video by the Ecuadorian artist Adrián Balseca, opens with petrol cans, plastic pots, used tubes and bottles suspended in the air against a very blue sky with trees in the background. Meanwhile, we hear animals in a forest environment, the wind whipping against the plastic objects and the physical efforts of a child off camera. With perfect timing, Balseca makes us wait before revealing a girl climbing the trunk of a balsa tree, in a reference to the popular game of ‘cucaña’ or greasy pole. ‘Suspensión I’ is part of a series of videos inspired by the subject of play. Here, Balseca records the last community living next to the Sangay National Park in the province of Morona Santiago, Ecuador. As in other works, the artist examines the extractivist and colonial logic of a perverse notion of progress. The ‘trophies’ of progress, the products made from the fossil fuels extracted from the area, hang from a pole in the so-called ‘País de la Cucaña’, or Land of the Cockaigne, a mythical land of plenty where nobody had to work. An improvised monument to plastic and oil that poignantly questions our way of life.