soft metallurgies

Ruby Reding received a grant for the development of the project soft metallurgies. Our world is awash with commodities that originate in mines and plantations, and while the last twenty years of digital production has intensified the appearance of immaterialities, there has never been as much matter drawn out from the earth as there is today. What critical and creative methods help focalize the epistemic gap between scenes of extraction, and the logistical spaces that carry those geologies into so many commodities for market? soft metallurgies instigates new artistic research, sculptures and field recordings, interrogating metallurgical desires and shadow geologies of aluminium.

Ruby is an artist and facilitator based in Rotterdam, working with sculpture, moving image and poetry. Her approach combines fieldwork, participatory workshops, writing, conversations with scientists, collecting scrap metal and visits to archives. In moving image installations, she feels out our disconnection from resource supply chains and the ensuing alienation, intimacies and violences caused by calculative infrastructures. Tending to material conditions, my sculptural works draw out the emotions and affects of scrap materials.