In early February, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery opened Salvage Archives, a video and installation by Miles Rufelds.
Salvage Archives consists of a video featuring two voices, one belonging to a conspiracy theorist and the other a historian of agriculture.
The film explores people’s attempts to make sense of the world, especially one where the systems that impact their lives can feel so arcane and counterintuitive.
The film is projected in a dark room filled with shipping flats, an object of the conspiracy theorist’s obsession as he investigates the patterns, he believes he sees in world supply chains.
Rufelds is an artist, filmmaker and researcher based in Toronto. Salvage Archives continues his pattern of using speculative fiction to explore themes of exploitation, waste and alienation under capitalism.
“I was always interested in art projects that I would encounter at galleries that would teach me things or [where I would] be made to think about things that would carry you on outside of the gallery, [and] be prompted to continue looking into things and using art as a catalyst for research or learning or pedagogy or contemplation,” Rufelds said.
Rufelds said there is a tendency to assume a nefarious plot or conspiracy behind the vast amount of waste created by various industries. However, he said the systems themselves drive people to insanity.
“But in fact, what they’re observing is just the idea of breakage, the idea of an insurance loss, or just the systemic waste of capitalism.,” Rufelds said.
“[The truth is] that the actual logical, by the books, functioning of this economic system is so irrational that these people are kind of driven mad by it,” he said.
The other narrator, the historian, talks the viewer through the history of agriculture and offers some explanation as to how society arrived at the system that is baffling to the conspiracy theorist.
“She, too, by the end, narrates the history of these things, but doesn’t come out with any kind of explanation as to what one is supposed to do about it,” Rufelds said.
“It’s this another form of this desire to know, this desire to uncover, that ultimately leaves people kind of in the same place where they [started],” he said.
The film and installation are juxtaposed with the exhibition A Broken Planet with photos by Edward Burtynsky that showcase evidence of humanity’s impact on the planet such as through images of a mountain eroded away by marble mining or a field of plastic waste.
The other exhibit, currently at KWAG, Expressions 50, showcases the work of youth in the Waterloo Region. One piece, “Guardians of Hope,” explores people’s hopes and fears for the future in the context of the threat of climate change and other harm to the environment.
The exhibition opened in February and will continue into May.
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