One way to think possible futures is to turn to the ruins of the past and the present. Moving through the plentitude of all that which already exists (through landscapes, buildings, images, stories, texts and sounds), one encounters many once visionary futures that have faded into the past. Seen in this way, our world is filled with such utopian debris, with myriad dumped potentialities and the slowly rotting traces they left behind.

The central theme of my artistic practice is to seek out and follow these traces, to critically reassess the past futures they lead to, and to try to graft new futures from them. Therefore I investigate different cultural and historical contexts with diverse media. An important strategy is to illuminate sites that are important in constituting our present reality and which contain promises of passed futures. I did this in the works “Theater of Combustion” (where a light sculpture illuminates oil fields in Azerbaijan by burning the resource, which was exploited and refined there) and “Ausleuchtung” (which re-stages a cosmist socialist mosaic in the former Stalinstadt in Eastern Germany). Under the title “Shedding Light” I propose for BIENALSUR: to show a photographic/film documentation of these works; and/or to develop a new project in this cycle specifically for BIENALSUR, continuing the strategy of critically casting light on relics of the past and thereby constructing understandings that might lead the way to new futures.