$15,000 USD

Artwork Description

This reflection by anthropologist Anna Tsing captures a crucial tension in how we relate to time and ecology today. Troika's work challenges this narrowed vision by expanding biodiversity not just spatially, but temporally — bringing extinct species and impossible ecologies into dialogue with present and future landscapes. By doing so, they resist the flattening of time into a single "trajectory" and instead open up a plural, speculative future where the boundaries between past, present, and future blur. Troika’s Out of Place, Out of Time enacts a form of “noticing” that refuses the stereotyped dream futures Tsing critiques, embracing complexity, coexistence, and the persistence of life beyond human-imposed temporal and taxonomic orders. These works are not loud, but they are insistent. They make visible what is no longer seen — or what never truly existed — not to deceive, but to make us pay attention to the constructedness of our seeing. They resist by refusing to let species slip away without record, even if that record is speculative. What does it mean to make a thousand-year photograph of a species already gone? Is it a tombstone? Or is it something more radical — a refusal to let disappearance be final? If naming a place once implied possession, perhaps re-imagining it now can mean un-possessing — loosening our grip, allowing place to become plural, to regenerate unpredictably. This resistance is not heroic. It is botanical. In Troika’s worlds, even the dead plants persist — not biologically, but symbolically, spectrally, plastically. They take root in the future through image. There is a sense in which these are not landscapes at all, but characters — or rather, portraits of landscapes, where the act of portrait-making itself lends personhood. Troika allows these ecologies to speak, not as backdrops to human drama, but as figures with agency and purpose beyond human narrative. Each image is a proposal for how the Earth might imagine itself, if it were trained on a century of data, if it dreamed in images instead of soil and sap. These are not romantic visions. They are works of constructive refusal — rejecting the binaries of natural/artificial, past/future, real/fake. The cactus is not simply out of place; it is the marker of a place that has changed. The platinotype does not simply preserve what is extinct; it asks us to face what endures. Out of Place, Out of Time is a cartography — not of what is, but of what insists on being seen. It does not map terrain; it maps the breakdown of fixity itself. In this geography, species cross borders they were never meant to cross. Environments stretch into unfamiliar configurations. Memory misbehaves. And the plants — so often background — take centre stage. These are not works about loss, but about the right to remain visible, even when out of place, even when time has moved on. Each image becomes a site of friction, where digital vision and ecological legacy confront one another. In that friction, something else begins: a slow resistance, made not of slogans, but of roots, forms, and futureproof salts. Noticing is resistance. Refusing to vanish is resistance. The land, misremembered, still speaks.