Thinking on Robert Smithson’s idea on ruin-in-reverse, the idea of the ruin being present before it is actually being made, or in Smithson’s words, a building doesn’t fall into ruin after it is being built, it raises into ruin before it is built, I aimed to find out what resides in the ruin matter that allows us to reimagine the future. My research suggested that rather than telling stories about the past, the creative process of making a prototype of an unbuilt is an alternative story about the future with glimpses of life and art in the present.

My material-led research used material collection, experimental practice, prototypes as sculpture storytelling as methods, to consider ideas around fragmentation, repetition and structure. Through themes of loss, memory and urbanization, I developed a new body of work that focuses on waste as a resource and as a material for artistic practice, which can put us away from the “take-make-discard” system into a more sustainable approach that takes me, the artist and researcher, as carrier for change.

“There are others here than me” (2020), a series of prototypes made with material objects in ruin, evoke the utopian modernist architecture and are assembled into monolithic structures to reflect the legacies of the capitalist modernity. These can be rearranged into multiple combinations as “childlike” building block games as metaphor to the prefabricated mode of living in postwar architecture. By putting these prototypes side by side, we can understand they have a geometric or spatial language to disrupt the utopian city paradigm of order and “total” system, in a way they show that the values in our society are constructions and that nothing is permanent.

Ferreira is currently a Phd Candidate at Royal College of Art, UK.