What remains possible when so much seems to be coming apart at the seams? What does it mean to live in the shadow of the ruined promises of the past? Consider the many despoiled landscapes of the Chesapeake Bay and our Jones Falls and Patapsco watersheds: junk heaps, rotting piers, spoil basins, and the many lingering marks of this region’s industrial heritage. How can we imagine what these places have been and what they may yet become as elements of future lives? And how might we connect these relics of our time with the natural and cultural life of other places as we work to reforest our own imaginations, thinking and working through the ruins of our time? These are questions essential to the environmental sensibility of “The Future of Here: A Glimpse of a River Culture to Come.” Prompted by the forms of possibility the exhibition reveals, participants will reflect on the kinds of happenings that can emerge from unlikely resources.

The Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui writes that in Aymara culture, the future is behind us and the past is in front: we can see what we know, but we cannot see the unknown. Building on this idea, and other alternatives to dominant habits of speculation and projection on the future, we seek to imagine the face of ruins ahead. Picture the future that slips through the crevices between rocks and stones, pierces the rough rubber, and nests in the harshness of rusty metal. Perhaps the future of futures is a face full of scars, which may embody pain and rupture but also healing and repair. Perhaps, in such a future, the pulse of life intertwines with the stillness of the inanimate. Taking a cue from the artifacts of the exhibition, we will seek to find that pulse together.

-Jane Bennett thinks about nature and non-human forces as they live around and in people. She teaches at Johns Hopkins in the environmental humanities. Her essays have appeared in Grain/Vapor/Ray, Evental Aesthetics, and LA+. She was profiled in The New Yorker in 2023 as “The Philosopher who Believes in Living Things.” She loves plants.

-Marina Bedran teaches Spanish and Portuguese at Johns Hopkins. She works on literature, visual culture, and the environmental humanities. Her current book project is an interdisciplinary study of the artistic turn to Amazonia in postwar Brazil. Prior to academia, she worked at cultural institutions and museums in São Paulo.

-Harris Feinsod teaches English at Johns Hopkins. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas. His recent work studies the landscape histories of oceans, coasts, and working waterfronts under conditions of globalization and environmental instability.

-Gisela Heffes is a writer and professor of Latin American literature and culture at Johns Hopkins with a particular focus on literature, media, and the environment in Latin America. Her most recent publications include Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment. Heffes has led the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment.

-Anand Pandian teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He is a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, and one of the organizers of “The Future of Here.” He is working on a new book project on decay, waste, and the crafting of ecological futures.

-Jordan Tierney’s artistic practice involves a daily pilgrimage to the urban streams and forests buffers of Baltimore, surrendering to whatever the Jones Falls watershed decides to teach her. Her sculptures of repurposed found trash encourage us to imagine new stories for our future and remind us of the sacred relationship we have with this living, breathing planet we call our home.

Co-sponsored by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health