Today we are stuck firmly in the eternal present; the past has little relevance and the only future imaginable is the status quo. It was once commonplace for architects to dream up other possible worlds and imagine different ways of life, but we have now lost the courage and conviction to propose any radical alternative to the current regime of banal neoliberal urbanism. The future is already decided, and it's boring.
This project aims to rediscover the concept of the "future" through an artistic dialogue with the industrial monuments of production and extraction etched into our landscapes. Turning our gaze away from the hyperreality of our contemporary cities and disconnecting our bodies from our C.A.D generated world, we intend to engage once more with reality - with the really existing territories of spatial manipulation and material extraction necessary for the production of our urban environments, and hopefully discover there, the possibility of an alternative future.
In June 2015 a small group of artists and architects gathered on the site of a former limestone quarry situated on the outskirts of Malmö to take part in the workshop "Monument to the Rubble of the Future", This quarry had once been the largest source of limestone in the country, feeding the cement factories nearby which in turn fed the Swedish construction industry, producing over one million homes between 1965 - 1974. (Image: "Skarne 66" by Nora Yous, Sofie Tolf, Bihter Celik, Luis Lanfredi)
Over a period of 4 days the artists camped on the site, exploring the fragments of utopia concealed within its striated layers of rock. What possibilities of an alternative future could this exhausted landscape reveal? (Image: "To Anji's Children" by Angelica Falkeling)
An uncanny manufactured landscape created by over 130 years of intensive material extraction. An artificial crater in the earths surface, whose absent matter is now contained in the concrete jungle of our urban environments, A negative mould of the city above (Image: "Paleotechnics" by Matthew Ashton)
The last load of limestone left the quarry in 1994, as cement production shifted to locations further afield, out of site and out of mind. A strange hybrid nature slowly overtook this fabricated geology, a diverse assortment of flora and fauna uncommon to the scandinavian peninsula, yet finding a new place of belonging on this raw earth. (Image: "Afterhuman" by Beatrice Orlandi)
The possibility of an alternative world is always haunting our present. If architecture is to rediscover the concept of the 'future', to once again have the courage to articulate radical alternatives to the status quo then maybe we could start by taking seriously the monumental unintended spatial consequences of our current way of life, from the mines that extend to the depths, to the timber plantations which extend to the horizons. (Image: "Lost in Transposition" by Tatiana Stadnichenko)
