Ruin, 2024

We dwell in the ruins as a site of trouble and as a place from which we make new worlds. Where progress finds itself in ruins, writes Anna Tsing, “it becomes possible to look differently.” This sculptural and augmented reality work opens a window into a layer of reality that is hidden: that is, the accumulation of disintegrating refuse and obsolete technology produced by capitalism. Through these augmented reality windows, we filled the gallery space and the university hallways with discarded and antiquated technology and metal refuse, implicating both the viewer and the university in the ruins of modernity. At the same time, the scrap metal—steel drums, rusty iron car doors, copper wiring, and bits of precious metals—and their state of disintegration, are beautiful. Awaiting a new life in the recycling yard, these scrapheaps become overgrown and entangled in nature, like the car we found in the bush outside our home. It is imbued with potentiality as it is repurposed by human and more-than-human recyclers, who build homes in rusted-out cavities, where rhizomes find purchase and mycelium tendrils take hold.