Ruderal Futures

Ruderal Futures is an ongoing research project that articulates a manifest proposition: inherited world systems – of colonial biopower, of capitalism, of modernity – can, will, and are ending. Subsequently, from the weeds of their ruin, a new more-than-human collective ‘we’ might emerge enriched.

Adapted from urban ecology, the word ‘ruderal’ refers to plants and other life-forms that populate environments disturbed by natural phenomena and human activity. However, more broadly, the ruderal exists both within and beyond the forces of state planning and capitalism’s project of organising nature, simultaneously holding a mirror to dominant systems while pointing towards forms of resistance and utopian otherness. By order of magnitude, it is less a product of human relations with their environment than the profound alteration of the earth’s surface that results from the hierarchical systems exceeding the agency of individuals and multitudes alike. Here, the ruderal emerges as a distinct minor territory and incidental model for futurity, gleaned from the wilful omission of a holistic conception of multispecies collaboration.

This exhibition evolves from an open-ended milieu of artist-researchers engaged with ruderal ecologies, who are here gathered to address the potential of weedy others as co-creators of alter-worlds of abundance. Using this platform, their contributions evoke plausible worlds of nonhierarchical kinship from the aftermath of both historic and ongoing colonial violence and capitalist anthropogenic land use. In this sense, Ruderal Futures presents a constellation of research-based practices assembled as an anarchive of intersecting citational affinities. Together, this exhibition unfolds in a form of space and time travel, where past, present, and future encounters – once dispersed over vast terrestrial divides – coalesce into this auspicious site of germination.

For SixtyEight Art Institute, works by Camilla Berner, Andrea Callard, Lindsey french, Yvette Granata, Next Epoch Seed Library, and Shuling Yuan and Ingo Vetter span over three continents and nearly five decades–from the 1970s to today. Each artist employs means of ruderal sensing in active examination of the heterogeneity of urban life. Their contributions present creative registers or proposals addressing countless entanglements between both human and other-than-human actors. The resultant projects materialise in practices of care, receptivity, and awareness toward subaltern spaces, species, and subjectivities that reside in the margins of authority and prevailing rigid disciplinary interests. Adopting diverse media and methods of social and ecological analysis, the artists presented here are united in genuine post-disciplinary and post-medium processes of interrelation.

Via these approaches, the artists in Ruderal Futures move on from narratives of scarcity, utility, productivity, and growth that shape extractive means of tapping environmental surroundings as resources. In doing so, they expose modes of being-with-the-world that are efflorescing out of the complex and contaminated gardens of these alien commons.

Kilde: SixtyEight Art Institute.