Forerunner The Future and stuff (2020), TULCA, Galway, curated by Sarah Browne and commissioned by TULCA 2020 and Galway County Council. Images: Ros Kavanagh.

the Future and stuff is a research project that builds on an increasing dissatisfaction with an outdated ‘Modern’ worldview. This work was conceived and designed to be exhibited with audio description written and recorded by Fala Buggy. Taking the phenomenon of fish ladders as an example of how the Modernist solves problems they have previously created tFas uses architectural  language and dam building-come-interior design to probe and critique the Capitalocene. Playing with form of a set of steps, the allusion to a naive progress and introducing an animal protagonist the Future and stuff is a large scale sculptural work that draws its form from invisible work within the gallery space and an intended future site.

In Off-Modern Svetlana Boym devises a new genre of architecture drawing on the work of Vladimir Taitlin and privileges an art that ‘co-creates with the remainders of history, collaborates with modern ruins,’. Within the Off-Modern it is possible to create a space for refection and rediscovery of ways in which our right to re-arrange the natural world has been taken for granted.

the Future and stuff is concerned with the necessary conditions for access; to the work, the space, the research context and its visual language. The a posteriori addition of fish ladders on dams is symptomatic of a lack of diverse thinking in terms of the architecture and engineering which designs and produces our everyday world. Being able to adapt, manipulate and understand your surroundings is a form of empowerment. With an increasing focus on blackboxing; everyday practices and objects are becoming further mythologised and further reducing your capacity to interact with or able to adapt them. the Future and stuff is an attempt to work through some of the common processes in technological redundancies alongside culturally dominant forms (the dam, concrete, large scale singular object) and explode them into an opened set of complexities (species migration, architectural mistakes, individual steps). 

Our work dismisses the Great-Man Theory of History outright in favour of an a-modern complexity which is never totally counted but created for viewers to explore and find for themselves. Likening our studio practice to a stunted form of Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” this work was designed with a deliberate complexity built into its exhibition. This is an attempt to diversify the experienced form and further break down expectations around exhibition making.