Tools for the Future, 2018-present

Initially this project seems fatalistic: discarded weaponry made to hurt an opponent. However, rather than objects for bodily harm, Tools for the Future can be seen as a poetic interpretation of the ‘social contract’, a device used by political philosophers to imagine and think through the possibility of reconstructing existing societies according to principles of justice.  Tools is not an apocalyptical vision of the future but a series of questions about the present, which in turn orient us towards what comes next.  These objects turn us back on ourselves, to threaten not, ‘what are you doing here?’ but rather ‘Who do you understand yourself to be?’ and ‘what will you do from now on?’  They are symbolic objects to question how complicit are we in an unjust society and in which ways do we want change.