FUTURE ESTATE by Matthew Harvey
with a talk by Matthew Harvey at 6.30pm
Saturday October 5, 8pm
During extensive travel between 2018 and 2024, Matthew Harvey photographed as widely as possible across a range of knotted ecological and infrastructural contexts being transformed by large-scale capital investment. Begun while working regularly in offset printing factories in East Asia, Europe, and North America, he was drawn to the messy and contingent worlds where life plays out at the factory’s extended edge. All shot on 35mm consumer-grade film, the film was developed, as far as possible, in one-hour labs in the locations where they were taken—the varying quality and color of the images reflecting differences in processing, scanning technologies, and human error—fading relics of another era in the intensive material and commercial production of everyday images.
Future Estate features 184 of those images, accompanied by texts based on autobiographical reflection and field notes, and an essay by AbdouMaliq Simone, documenting how places are organized and disorganized by commodity production; the geopolitics of development; and the zoning practices, extractions, and transnational investments that come with uneven processes of global labor and distribution. The book makes use of the unheroic image, the sideways view of the margins, offering alternative pathways to consider a world produced, consumed, constructed, maintained, variously inhabited, and precariously lived.