Speculative Fictions: Miles Rufelds’ 'Salvage Archives'
By Ioana Dragomir
Overnight, the mountains of evidence disappeared, or else had never been there to begin with. The large, anonymous room lay derelict. Shipping pallets were stacked empty, strewn with leaves that had already begun to rot, as if time itself had sped up the process of decay to cover someone’s tracks. The room could have been in disuse for weeks if not months, a musty smell lingering and the sound of panicked footsteps bouncing off the empty walls as you looked for a sign, any sign, that you had not gone absolutely insane.
I’ve been thinking about conspiracy and how close it is to poetry. Poetics involves putting two unrelated things beside each other and coming to a conclusion that is constructed, but feels entirely natural, as if it is the only right answer. This logic of poetry, when applied to a real world full of unknowable phenomena and untrustworthy agents, comes undone. Paranoid, it begets a way of seeing the world where flight patterns of birds are a breadcrumb trail to abandoned shipping containers full of mysterious contents. Incidents coalesce into phenomena, data points produce complex relations, and like making sense of constellations, an image is deciphered out of what was previously only understandable as chaos.
Conspiracy, like poetry, can begin when we realize that the natural order of things is not natural at all. We make poetry when we learn that language can break all its own rules, it can do whatever we please. Conspiracy materializes when facts, taken as irrefutable truths, also falter. That, for instance, there has always been and must always be hunger. It sounds like a fact, a consequence of the not-enough-ness of food and the undeserving-ness of certain people to it. Then you learn that there is enough, more than enough, that entire warehouses of food sit and rot and still people starve.
Speculation begins, because if hunger is not a natural truth, then it must be a manufactured one. And if it is manufactured, who continues to produce it? Miles Rufelds’ exhibition Salvage Archives uses the language of speculative fiction, conspiracy, and documentary to make strange this and other “truths” of late-stage capitalism. His video installation, set in a dimly lit gallery space crowded with (yes) bare shipping pallets and rotting leaves follows two narratives. In one, an unnamed narrator – a conspiracy theorist – obsesses over the mysterious fate of abandoned shipping containers sold off to the highest bidder sight-unseen. In the other, an anonymous academic describes the history of agriculture, spanning from antiquity to modern supply chains.
Photo by Toni Hafkenshield, courtesy of Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
Both narratives concern surplus and how it affects the way we understand value. On one level, the value of food is its ability to nourish, excite, and bring people together. The other value of food, especially food in such surplus, is a speculative one. It is an amount of money arrived at through a series of calculations that you or I do not have access to. It is not fixed; it drops and rises. Today, a prime minister announced that food is indeed too expensive and that the citizens of a country need governmental aid to offset the effects of the inflation that is starving them. In Rufelds’ video, peasants in a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder gorge themselves on an unending supply of food that rots as they cannot keep up with its infinite abundance.
“Think of the most that has ever been had by anyone. Now think of it again. There’s more than before, isn’t there?” asks the disembodied voice in the room full of pallets empty like the ribs of a picked-over carcass. Numbers and the imaginary win out over reality.
Walking away from Rufelds’ video, I am already filing away his narrators’ claims and fusing them with other half-remembered facts to form a version of this tale that is even more muddled. I do not know how much of what he has told me is true and how much is a clever fiction, or a clever narrativization of some vague facts. I don’t know if people really do purchase shipping containers without knowing what’s inside them. I don’t know if the birds really are clues, or if the history of the cornucopia I have been told is the correct one, or if the message boards full of people trying to puzzle these things together have been deleted–as the conspiracy theorist claims–or if they never existed. In what has become a default reaction to any new information in an age of such uncertainty, I don’t trust it.
What I do know is that long after the exhibition has ended, I will be having a conversation with someone about food systems and capitalism and value and I will cite something, and I will remember after the fact that I am citing Miles. And because the exhibition is over, and the version of his video that exists online is password protected, and because credibility was never really the point, I will not be able to back up my claim. Some version of truth proliferates and mutates.
Salvage Archives was an exhibition by Miles Rufelds, curated by Darryn Doull, on view at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery from 8 February to 25 May 2025.
Ioana Dragomir (@dragomir.ioana.dragomir) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer currently based in Montreal, Canada. She has published her writing with Ciel Variable, Public Parking, Syphon, and others. Her artistic practice combines her interest in writing and literary analysis with drawing, textiles, and installation. She loves Sappho, Anne Carson, and Virginia Woolf.