A Minnesota Exhibit Framed Around Longing for Home (Published 2022)

When I arrived at the old Qlapaw tribal site, I accidentally discovered the abandoned hut of a mountain farm. It was a shelter built with canvas printed campaign portraits, bamboo and wood of various lengths. It looks like a nest woven with plastic straps in order to lay eggs by parent birds who weave its nest in the wastes of the modern world. It ... See more

When ruins become ground for creation rather than objects from devastated pasts, they cultivate belief in what’s possible. It’s a shift that people like Tsing insist is essential to moving beyond extractive cycles of “promise and ruin, promise and ruin.”

As places where disaster has already occurred, ruins are proof that life continues even when everything goes wrong — and that beauty and connection can be cultivated in the process.

A culture that defines itself on striving its way to the future has been forced into the timeless underworld; a place full of ghosts and voyagers, infinite possibility and potent danger. This pandemic has not called us into a heroic adventure, but forced us to descend into silence and darkness and humility.

Reconceptualized in this way, “home” is untethered from land, family, and lineage. It is siphoned off from the liberal fetish of homeownership — that quintessential image, derived from a short-lived American postwar prosperity, of a picket-fenced house with parents, kids, car, dog. Of course, the feeling of home is not a substitute for actual shelt... See more