Madeleine Ruggi (b.1991) is an artist working in London, UK. Ruggi’s work seeks to grasp her own position among vast infrastructures of trade that sprawl across the globe yet remain largely unseen by consumers. She uses conversations, site visits, radio communications, field recordings, and found materials along with steel, collage and print to ask how she can responsibly engage with the world, understanding how decisions in her immediate setting may impact systems at large.
In 2022, after completing her MFA in Rotterdam—where her practice focused on the circulation of global capital and the processing of commodities at the city’s port, the largest in Europe—Ruggi returned to the UK to continue this line of enquiry. She navigates between the sites, materials, frequencies, and archives that signal the immense – yet often unfamiliar – systems of trade in which she is implicated. She re-presents these ‘invisible’ materials using installation, sound, sculpture, and embossing to become human-scaled tangible entities which serve to confront the dizzying cycles of capital within which we live.
Her seemingly ordinary, small-scale found materials have ranged from a slice of container ship exterior to a VHF radio scanner or a length of tyre tread, all of which bear witness to the overlooked — and often remarkably sculptural — physical materials that serve gargantuan trade systems. Her direct, bodily engagement with these loaded materials connects individual states of desire with large-scale demand, and reflects on the mediation and power that fuel global industries, while examining the broader consequences of personal consumption.
At the core of Ruggi’s works are the intricate proximities between commodity exchange, volatile systems of value, and production lines, considering both those who produce and those who consume. She is drawn to the tension between these worldwide abstract infrastructures, characterised by their rigidity and detachment, and the bodily realities they inevitably shape, govern, and often exploit.
Recently, her research has broadened to explore the decentralised logistics and labour of haulage. It focuses on the tentacular systems of distribution whose roads and pathways crisscross the UK to reach one’s own very door.