The Unknown Future Rolls Towards Us

Mixed media installation. 2019.
Variable dimensions. Discarded car seat, car tires, hardware store cart, toddler's mattress, clear tubing, plastic bottles, vinyl player, LP's from the Environments album series (1969-1979), bird toys, candy, dead insects, automatic plant watering system, sink, solar powered bird fountain pump, plumbing hardware, brick, steel wire, water pumps, electronic valve, moss, Ivy (Hedera Helix) plants, plastic, fluorescent dye, water, electronics.

A considerable amount of cultural production entertains the notion of a post-apocalyptical future. What though, comes after the immediate cataclysmic fallout?

"The Unknown Future Rolls Towards Us" imagines a post-“post-apocalyptic” world: a world in which humans are absent, in which a resilient nature has re-balanced itself anew alongside various human-made detritus and artifacts which have survived us. Using combinations of modified found object assemblages, biological plant matter, and electrically charged kinetic and sonic components, a hybrid ecosystem emerges - one which is living, albeit in a manner that is estranged to us.

Can a wasteland become a garden? A candy-filled car tire vacuum-sealed to a child’s bed on a hardware store cart; a discarded sink overgrown with wild Ivy and berries, functioning as a fluorescent birdbath. A mechanical bird flying overhead eternally in circles, oblivious to the notion of rest, echoed by a record player playing the first commercially available soundscape recordings on repeat. A defunct car seat is overgrown with moss; a collection of plastic bottles and circular clear tubing strewn through the entire scene pump pink fluid in slow pulse.

The collective scene is suffused with natural and mechanical allusions, corporeal metaphors, and muted memories of a past in which abundant production was commonplace and taken for granted. Always moving, always sounding, busy and active; but for whom? a future hybrid ecology, a series of intricate laments, songs, and sound-poems, performed for no-one in particular.

Produced during with the support of the Braunschweig Projects fellowship at HBK Braunschweig, Germany.

photos by Adam Basanta.