Salvage Archives
2025Salvage Archives is a video installation, initially presented as a solo exhibition at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, curated by Darryn Doull.
The installation acts as an immersive viewing environment and theatrical backdrop to a 42-minute essay/fiction film of the same name.
Salvage Archives continues Rufelds’ research into cultural and subcultural expressions of late capitalist alienation, and the forms of collective storytelling that take shape under the shadows of unjust material systems.
Told in a hybrid narrative style, mixing elements of essay film, social realism, and neo-noir, Salvage Archives oscillates between two narrative threads, counterposing a lonely online conspiracy theorist and a disembodied historian of agriculture. The two figures recount their stories in alternating chapters, perversely mirroring each other as they wade into the knotted abstractions of capitalist productive systems, logistics networks, patterns of accumulation, and systemic waste.
As both narrators’ grandiose overtures slowly narrow, contort, or fizzle out, the film meditates on the failures of narrativity, synthesizing themes of digital loneliness, class alienation, capitalist paranoia, and the tragic arc of histories constrained by these forces.
Photos by Toni Hafkensheid, courtesy of the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
