Scupper: Curated by Carlos Agredano

noun: scupper; plural noun: scuppers
• a hole in a ship's side to carry water overboard from the deck.
origin: late Middle English: perhaps via Anglo-Norman French from Old French escopir 'to spit'; compare with German Speigatt, literally 'spit hole'.

verb: scupper; 3rd person present: scuppers; past tense: scuppered; past participle: scuppered; gerund or present participle: scuppering
• sink (a ship or its crew) deliberately.
• prevent from working or succeeding; thwart
origin: late 19th century (as military slang in the sense 'kill, especially in an ambush')

 

Scupper is a group exhibition organized around a central question: how do our infrastructural systems define, excrete, and destroy their waste?  

In the 21st century, the inadequacies of our infrastructure are coalescing into the collapse of our financial, social, medical, legal, and environmental systems. In tandem with an already unstable foundation, new technologies are further accelerating this disintegration. 

The exhibition functions as a mirror to the collapse, artworks are haphazardly scattered across the gallery space, precariously hovering over and around visitors. These objects include self-destructed machines, removed pieces of hostile architecture, futile financial interventions, scavenged detritus, industrial byproducts, air pollution, human particulate matter, artificial intelligence, and forensic representations of urban wastelands. 

To be a scupper (noun) is to function as an exit, a hole designed to remove harm to a systems structural integrity; to scupper (verb) is to intentionally thwart another structure from succeeding. Our globalized world embodies both noun and verb, it is a paradoxical structure that dismantles itself as it builds.

This exhibition neither scuppers nor is a scupper, it is the carnage of our cannibalized systemsproposes no solutions but exists as the last dregs of our crumbling infrastructure. 

The ship is sinking!