Futures Fade in Fiber

Jute enters the exhibition already burdened with history.

For centuries the fiber circulated through colonial trade routes carrying grain, coffee, cocoa, sugar, and other commodities across continents. Every sack contains the traces of movement: labour, extraction, transportation, ownership, exchange. Before it becomes an artwork, it has already participated in multiple economies and geographies.

This condition resonates with our practice. Much of our work investigates what remains concealed within systems of circulation: routes, infrastructures, administrative structures, rumours, gestures, and forms of social organisation that operate beneath visibility. Jute renders such networks material.

The fiber occupies an ambiguous position between organism and infrastructure. Cultivated as a plant, it later appears as packaging, architecture, agriculture, geotextile, and logistical support. We are interested in this instability. It mirrors recurring concerns within our work, where distinctions between landscape and culture, document and fiction, body and environment, remain deliberately unsettled.

Particularly significant are jute geotextiles used to stabilise riverbanks and prevent erosion. Designed to disappear once their task is complete, they leave behind altered conditions rather than permanent structures. Their logic resembles many of our own interventions: temporary actions that operate through transformation rather than monumentality.

Historically, jute functioned as a surface of administration. Ownership, weight, destination, inventory, and origin were printed directly onto the fiber, making global systems of circulation legible.

We begin from this history.

A jute sack never arrives empty. Its surface is already occupied by labour, trade, and movement. Rather than treating the material as a neutral support, we approach it as a counter-surface: a ground that resists the fantasy of beginning from zero.

The coarse weave remains visible. Existing marks persist. Every inscription enters into negotiation with what is already there.
The language applied to the works draws from the visual vocabulary of logistical and bureaucratic systems. Hand-painted letters echo stencil fonts, inventories, manifests, shipping marks, municipal signage, and administrative records. The forms suggest order, classification, and authority.

Yet the texts refuse their expected function.

Where bureaucratic language seeks precision, these inscriptions introduce ambiguity. Where logistical systems organise movement, the texts interrupt it. Fragments drift between observation, speculation, memory, and fiction. Meaning remains unstable.

The work inhabits the space between archive and poem, record and rumour.

Rather than adding language to the material, the inscriptions go into dialogue with the histories already embedded in the fiber itself. The result is neither documentation nor illustration, but a series of speculative annotations attached to the routes, labour, and infrastructures that jute continues to carry.