C A R A
D A V I E S
The Future We Left Behind (2020)
Installation created in collaboration with Mads Floor Andersen. Presented at MK Gallery as part of the exhibition MK Calling 2020 (Feb-Oct 2020)
We invite you to dig.
Excavate the soil to unearth fragments of our past.
Each fragment embodies a plethora of potential futures not lived.
Each fragment is a glance at what could have been. We do not seek to glance and then dwell in nostalgia, rather by glancing back we invite you to reflect on a trajectory of thoughts through time, memory, and history which now shape the way we live today.
As a token of our gratitude for your thoughts, we invite you to take a vial and fill it. We gift to you the futures we left behind. Treasure it and see what it may become.
The Future We Left Behind is a pile – an archaeological meshwork of soil and concrete, where the past is undefined. A time suspended between that which “once was” and that which is “to come”; where the choices of our past lay the foundations of our future, but do not necessarily determine its outcome.
At the beginning of 2020, the world was caught in a political bind where past events left the future uncertain. We felt it was therefore imperative to reflect on our past’s resonance in the presence before tipping into the social histories that lie ahead of us. We questioned: how to make sense of the past? how to reshape history in the thickness of soil, memories, love, politics, land ownership, and druid circles.
The Future We Left Behind is thus an odd kaleidoscope that requires us to face our past. It invited visitors to delve into the soil, to unearth the past, which we gifted to people to take home and to be part of their future to come.