FELIPE DE ÁVILA FRANCO

Futures in Display, 2019-21

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The accumulation of construction and industrial waste of varied origins dumped in the environment at many regions in the world produces contamination of different types and at different levels, caused by substances in the very composition of these materials. Besides an urgent and extremely complex socio-environmental issue it also configures a new paradigm of temporality once modern industrial wastes have peculiar properties of durability and ubiquity: they do not degrade easily and can be found almost everywhere, leading to reflections regarding 'what does it means to inhabit to a permanently contaminated environment?' 

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Regardless, there is a phenomenological expressiveness in the instant of encounter with such materials that often reveal themselves as potential articulators of dialogues that allow us to emancipate from more orthodox notions of the relationship between human and non-human entities. Further, these materials translate how uncontrolled industrial activities produce modes of ruin with unique architectural fossils that alter our perception of the future. Transformed by the action of the climate and time, these once-functional structures are now transfigured from simple object-residues into artifacts which, beyond mere debris and remains, "portray and manifest the consummated revolt of nature".

Prosaic objects become signs of history, which have to be deciphered. So the poet becomes not only a naturalist or an archaeologist, excavating the fossils and unpacking their poetic potential, he also becomes a kind of symptomatologist, delving into the dark underside or the unconscious of a society to decipher the messages engraved in the very flesh of ordinary things. (The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes - Jacques Ranciere)

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The work consists of a series of glass displays reuniting collections of found objects such as disposed of mechanic components, constructive debris, bones, driftwood and rocks altered by the action of climate, together with small cast sculptures made out of contaminated residues combined with traditional sculpture materials such as cement and plaster. After some kind of forensics-like process, the glass made displays protect at the same time it isolate these objects, as if confirming its reviewed status of uncanny artifacts, allowing visual contact but no recognition of their origin.

 

These unknown items come from different regions and geographically distant spaces but they share the same hyper-condition of inhabiting a 'contaminated reality'. The gathering of materials and the production of the work was undertaken between 2019 and 2021, throughout several approaches to areas where large-scale industrial activities or environmental disasters have been reported in different regions of Northern Europe.