This article zooms into a conversation exchange with the Dominican visual artist Tony Capellán to analise issues of cultural places of refuge, regimes of waste and plastic production, and art economies. This essay urges for a materialist understanding of artistic exchanges. It argues that the globalisation of contemporary art that reached its peak in the 1990s should be seen as part of broader world-ecological transformations. This means that contemporary artistic practice does much more than mirroring economic and ecologic matters; as an activity, it lies at the centre of a wide diversity of processes of socialisation and more-than-human assemblages. Starting from an exchange with Capellán and from a personal experience of visiting his atelier in 2010, this article reconsiders crucial aspects of Caribbean cultural production and planetary aesthetics.