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A Swedish woman found her long-lost mixtape after it went missing for two decades.
Stella Wedell lost her mixtape while on vacation in Spain when she was 12 years old. Her tape included hits by British duo Pet Shop Boys and Jamaican singer Bob Marley.
Twenty years later, she spotted the mixtape and its tracklist at an art exhibit in Stockholm, Sweden. She took a photo of the tape and compared it with the CD she used to make her mixtape. Wedell found that it had all the same songs except for the original CD’s first two tracks, which she had excluded intentionally when she made her mixtape.
Convinced that the mixtape was hers, Wedell contacted Mandy Barker, the British artist and photographer who hosted the exhibit. According to Barker, she found the mixtape after it had washed up on Fuerteventura [fwer-tee-ven-TOO R–uh], a Spanish island off of Africa, in 2017. The island is more than 1,200 miles away from where Wedell had lost the tape.
Upon finding the tape, Barker enlisted the help of a professional audio restorer to help her retrieve all the songs recorded inside. She decided to include the mixtape in her exhibit, “Sea of Artifacts,” which featured various plastic trash. The artist agreed to return the mixtape to Wedell once her exhibit finishes its run.
According to an international marine litter expert, Wedell and Barker’s story is an example of how plastic pollution can be a danger to the environment. He said that the tape remaining intact all those years shows the longevity of plastic and the risks it poses to the marine environment.