Essay by Indigo Ripper-Stranieri for Contextualising Practice 

 

Introduction / Acknowledgment 

I offer my respect to the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waterways on which I conduct my research, study, and art practice, the Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri Woi Worung language groups, the people of the Kulin Nation, and their Elders past and present. Whose knowledge, storytelling and worlding have taught, inspired and informed my practice around speculative fiction and imagining future ruins. I use the word Custodians with strong intent, as the idea of “land ownership” is inherently a capitalist colonial mode of thought, which has ultimately laid the foundations and groundwork for the sort of extractivism and individualism that has led us to this particular moment at the end of this world. My art practice and ideology are concerned with the notion that humans belong to the earth rather than the other way around.

When I was younger, I would imagine the future, holding onto this dream world as a form of solace and escape from what felt like a suffocating reality of my queer adolescence. I find myself now in this future, as I had imagined it, but as I have grown and developed into a truer version of myself, the world around me has been crumbling. The social progress the world had been making is unravelling slowly as the planet is collapsing under the weight of our capitalistic lifestyle based on extraction and greed. I soon realised there is no future left for me to dream of, unless I imagine beyond our future. Italian philosopher Frederico Campagna (2019) poses the notion of the ‘post-future’, one that is beyond our current ‘time segment’. Campagna (2019) asserts that ‘time is made of segments, not of lines’, implying that time is inherently circular, not linear. I view this sense of time as being in conjunction with the cycle of death, decay, and rebirth, as materials, people, animals, and all things are constantly in an individual state of growth or decay. This repeating cycle of growth and decay is etched into the ruins of the past, and in the ruins of an unknown future, this space in between what is gone and coming is where I place my art practice. I tie both the past and future together in an assemblage of material remains.

Throughout this essay, I examine the relationship between the material and artistic intent behind my work, which is driven by speculative fiction, exploring the theoretical and narrative concept of future ruins.

Worlding Within Imagined Future Ruins

Worlds collapse and re-emerge over and over again, the collapse of this western capitalist, colonial world seems more imminent than ever with increasing threats of war, the climate crisis, and political unrest. As the lines between government and corporate authority blur, it has become time to re-imagine what the post-future of this ruined society could become and how we can help shape and guide the next world through our creations. Campagna (2020) describes worlding as a long, complex activity based on our perceptions and a system of collective ordering of objects within an environment, and that this ordering is where ethics and logic originate. The ruins of past civilisations are the seeds from which new worlds are sprouted.

As an artist and cultural producer, Campagna (2020) argues it is my responsibility to leave ‘fertile ruins’ for future people to make their world in, artifacts for the future. I interpret the concept of ruins more figuratively in my art practice. Instead of creating objects that will become ruins, I create narratives through objects that already exist and are in varying stages of ruin, symbolising the decay of our current world. When these collected objects are assembled together, they create a landscape of ‘ruins [which, as Dobraszczyk notes,] are memorials, as all ruins are’ (2017:117) of our present era.

Worlding is also considered in the ideas of new materialism. As Palmer and Hunter (2018) have argued new materialism is ‘informed by our turning of attention to a certain experience, place or encounter and our active engagement with the materiality and context in which events and interactions occur’. I am interested in worlding that is created through collaboration, and the acknowledgment of the involvement of both human and more-than-human life. As Chinese American anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explains through her exploration of matsuke mushrooms and their capability to thrive in human disturbed environments ‘even humble creatures participate in making worlds’ (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015:158). More-than-humans participate in creating worlds, for example, the fungi that live below the soil, which create a vast network of communication between the trees of a forest. This is an act of creating worlds that inspires my ability to imagine how we can return to a more collaborative way of living within the ruins of a capitalist world, where we reside in not an individualistic disposition but one that exists beside all that is alive.

Speculative Fiction / Storytelling Landscapes of the Future

‘[T]he plant becomes capable of unleashing speculative energies for envisioning and indeed participating in the world as other than it may appear to us.’ (Meeker and Szabari 2019)

I incorporate this concept of worlding into my speculative fictions, creating internal narratives that drive my sculptural art practice. I aim to tell stories of the future and its connection to our current time and landscapes. I want the narratives in my practice to be embedded with a resistance to our current world and the capitalist systems that run it, replacing these with ideals of connection, mutual aid and of human symbiosis with nature. Indigenous Australian author and academic, Tyson Yunkaporta (2023) argues that the tradition of storytelling and narrative should be applied to contemporary landscapes and ecologies, to apply warnings for future and current generations that urge us to change the way we live and to create regenerative systems. Yunkaporta et al (2023:69) urges settlers to listen and amplify Indigenous knowledge and voices for ‘If we are unable to bring settlers back under the Law of the Land, then everything and everyone here will soon die’. Storytelling is an integral part of creating culture and in turn of creating worlds. I believe that stories can be viewed as both ‘fertile ruins’ for future people to interpret and as a way of healing the present. My narratives are concerned with healing western humanity’s broken connection to land and the earth through ‘re-story-ation’ (Wall Kimmerer 2013:9). Through my stories and my worlding I aim to challenge and rewrite these western post-enlightenment narratives that portray humans as above and separate to nature and the earth.

Installation / Remains of the Future

British sculptural artist Mike Nelson describes his intent behind the detailed, multidimensional aspects of his installation-based practice, which echoes my own approach of embedded narratives and layered experiences. His intent has always been to make immersive works that operate on multiple levels. They should have a narrative, a spatial aspect, but also a psychological effect on the senses’ (Higgins 2023). In my artwork Take Refuge in What Remains, 2025 (see figure 1), I explore speculative future ruins—where the material remnants of our present become the landscape of the distant future, inhabited by new beings and inhabitants creating a world for themselves within these ruins. Focusing on a story of ecological collapse, a landscape persists in a state of constant death and rebirth. My artwork explores the possibility of life after capitalism; among the broken pieces of the world, something is born. Just as the ‘Matsutake [mushrooms, which have a] willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to explore the ruin that has become our collective home’ (Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015:3). To create this installation, I combined scavenged materials and objects from roadsides, hard rubbish, and skips. I’m drawn to anything rusted, weathered, and damaged—showing signs of decay and rot, and the implication of the passage of time. As DeSilvey has noted (2006:323) ‘decay reveals itself not (only) as erasure but as a process that can be generative of a different kind of knowledge’. Objects of ruin imply a sense of history or memory of a life that has already been lived, on the edge of being forgotten.

In my installation, I combine these detritus materials with sculpted ceramic figures of bone and bodily remains (see figures 2-5). These bone-like sculptures don’t fully mimic the human and animal remains we are used to; something is different. Their shape and form are more evolved or mutated, perhaps. The extra joins or spiked edges imply that they belong to people or creatures not from our time or world; they are fragments of another world, from the far future. Clay is a timeless material, which has been used for millennia throughout cultures across the world, and once fired it can survive for centuries, the objects of these materials remain, becoming remnants of past civilisations. The materials within my installation further explore this narrative and objective truth that as Indigenous Australian filmmaker and Author, Frances Peters-Little (2020) explains ‘all things will outlast us, the land will change, and survive … Yes, the land will be different. But new things will come of it’.

Throughout my sculptural and installation-based practice, detritus objects play a key role in creating the landscapes and environment of my speculative future world. My material choices are informed by the narrative, and in turn, my narrative is informed by the materials, as Mike Nelson explains, ‘sculpture is constantly falling back into the very matter from which it’s made, and then coming into vision as something suggested’ (Higgins 2023). Theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett (2010) proposes a sense of ‘materiality that is as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension’, the materials in my work take on a life of their own and an implied sense of being.

Conclusion / Repurposing Remains and Ruins – Building a Future out of Fragments 

The narrative that drives my art practice started out as a pessimistic scene, one of a classic dystopian apocalyptic future, but soon evolved to become one of hope and resistance. Life emerging from the ruins of our world, such as the Matsutake mushrooms, which thrive in human-disturbed forests. I found hope in the autonomy of the natural world and the circular narrative of the earth’s regenerative and adaptive power. My narratives became more focused on the aftermath of a broken world, and about how to live and create a world that can return to ideas of connectivity, community, cross-species coordination and ultimately a sense of belonging. ‘[Worlding] is above all an embodied and enacted process – a way of being in the world – consisting of an individual’s whole-person act of attending to the world’ (Palmer and Hunter 2018). Worlding has become more than a form of art but a way of living for me, it’s not too late to make new worlds.

 

References

Bennett J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822391623-004

Campagna F (26 June 2020) ‘Federico Campagna: The End of the World(s)’,RIBOCA, Youtube website, accessed 13 May 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxORkFUNpE8&t=3914s

Campagna F and Conty A (28 November 2019) ‘Old Worlds and New Beginnings: Digital Earth Talks’, Art Jameel, Youtube website, accessed 13 May 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIT-Ut_o5ug

DeSilvey C (2006) ‘Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things’, Journal of Material Culture, 11(3):318-338, https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506068808

Dobraszczyk P (2017) The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay, I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited, London.

Higgins C (15 February 2023) ‘Interview: ‘I Made an Exhibition for Dogs’: Enter the Strange Alternative Universes of Artist Mike Nelson’, The Guardian, accessed 28 May 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/14/i-made-an-exhibition-for-dogs-enter-the-strange-alternative-universes-of-artist-mike-nelson

Lowenhaupt Tsing A (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, Oxfordshire.

McGrath A (19 August 2020) ‘All Things Will Outlast Us’: How The Indigenous Concept Of Deep Time Helps Us Understand Environmental Destruction’, The Conversation, accessed 15 May 2025. https://theconversation.com/all-things-will-outlast-us-how-the-indigenous-concept-of-deep-time-helps-us-understand-environmental-destruction-132201

Meeker N and Szabari A (2019) Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction,  Fordham University Press, New York.

Palmer H and Hunter V (2018) Worlding, New Materialism website, accessed 20 May 2025. https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/w/worlding.html

Poelina A, Davis M, Bagnall D, Graham M,Timmulbar Williams R, Yunkaporta T, Marshall C, Anthony Diop S, Samnakay N and Maloney M (2024) Declaration of Peace for Indigenous Australians and Nature A Legal Pluralist Approach to First Laws and Earth Laws: A Place for Second Lore: Certainty, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9327-7

Wall Kimmerer R (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Skywoman Falling, Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis.