Towards an Archaeology of the Future
Gavin Kroeber creates events, gatherings, and excursions that interrogate the cultural dynamics of power and their expression in the poetics of place.
Artist BioTowards an Archaeology of the Future is a multi-year cycle of gatherings and art actions in Northern California’s wildfire landscapes. The project will bring together an interdisciplinary ensemble of artists, Native land stewards, fire ecologists, survivor community members, landscape architects, environmental activists, and other participants to inhabit wildfire burn zones in the long tail of disaster, returning to these spaces as resurgent fire ecologies transform the land and speculative real estate re-colonizes it. Through artistic fieldwork and exchange—landscape salons, walks, cultural burns, sound performances, ephemeral architecture builds—participants will collaborate to experimentally generate reparative pyroculture and, ultimately, a culminating series of site-specific art actions in the burn zones, to be accompanied by an exhibition at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art and the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center.
Gavin Kroeber
St. Louis, Missouri
Gavin Kroeber received the Creative Capital Award in 2024. Gavin Kroeber creates events, gatherings, and excursions that interrogate the cultural dynamics of power and their expression in the poetics of place. His work poaches from visual art, urbanism, and experimental theater, blurring artistic, curatorial, and dramaturgical modes of authorship. Kroeber frequently explores landscape through decolonial and posthumanist lenses, in projects such as Art + Landscape STL (2018-19), presented by the HKW (Berlin) and G-CADD (St. Louis) and Landscape Experience (2015) at Mildred’s Lane (PA). He orchestrates interdisciplinary gatherings that route participants through cityscapes, such as New Cities, Future Ruins (2016), awarded Southern Methodist University’s Meadows Prize, and Dwell in Other Futures: Art / Urbanism / Midwest (2018). His performance lectures and experimental walks include Approaching Landscape City (2019) at G-CADD and Not Objects in the Landscape, but a Landscape of Objects (2015) at Storm King Art Center (NY). Kroeber serially instigates think tanks, salons, and experimental schools, including Fire School (2020-21) and Laboratory for Suburbia (2020-ongoing). Kroeber has been a member of several art collectives, including the experimental event platform Experience Economies (2010-15). He has written for Afterall, Art Journal, Art in America, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. He holds a Master of Design Studies from the Harvard GSD and is currently Lecturer in the College of Architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art and the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis.