I am an artist based in Rotterdam, working with moving image, poetry and installation. In my work, I feel out our disconnection from resource supply chains and the ensuing alienation and violences caused by calculative infrastructures. I look to rhythmic intimacies and the elemental, poetic and close-up in order to re-visceralise our experiences of scientific apparatus and hidden infrastructures. Exploring forms of control and domination that shape resource circulations, my work thinks with abstraction and poetic registers to put forward new forms of attunement.
My research combines fieldwork, workshops, conversations with scientists, collecting scrap metal and visits to archives. I ask how these methodologies can offer slanted knowledges and forms of material kinship in response to precarious and ruinous conditions of extractive, colonial capitalism. In sculpture, I have worked with scrap metals, casting, glass and textiles. Composed of both tenuous and stable joins such as bolts and textile seam binds, my sculptures consider different forms of repairing and queer or unstable attachments.
I am currently instigating new research on soft metallurgies, tracing entanglements between aluminium supply chains and their correlation with whiteness and gender. In this project, I ask what creative methods help focalize the epistemic gap between scenes of bauxite extraction, and the logistical spaces that carry those geologies into market commodities. Through images of the London Metal Exchange and archival images of Alcoa and Alcan, the colonial multinational aluminium corporations that emerged out of WWII, the project asks how image making can critically read the British Imperial role in metal production and supply.
I have facilitated workshops in Rotterdam and London at Turf Projects including collaborative filmmaking in the field, river ecologies and poetics. From 2023–2024, I was Research Assistant in the Fine Art department at Goldsmiths, University of London.
E: rubyreding@gmail.com
IG: @rubyvenus