Online Event | Moderated by Curator Liz Faust

“What grows in the cracks of what we’ve left behind?”

As industrial infrastructures deteriorate and urban environments shift, new ecologies are rising—often overlooked, often fragile, yet full of insight. This virtual panel explores the intersections of environmental memory, rewilded spaces, and speculative ecology through the lens of contemporary art.

Bringing together artists from Industrial Afterglow whose work centers environmental reclamation and ecological imagination, Rewilding Futures investigates how weeds, wetlands, and wildness become teachers, storytellers, and agents of resilience.

Participating Artists:

• Chelsey Barrera & Gracie Horne — co-creators of Balti-MORE Wetlands, a speculative zine mapping Baltimore’s forgotten waterways and flood zones through Indigenous knowledge and environmental justice frameworks.

• Edgar Reyes —  multimedia artist whose photo series explores migration as an ecological shift, documenting the promise of a new future by focusing on how land tells a story of adaptation and resistance through nature's silent and persistent reclamation.

• Alexandra Garove — scanographic animator crafting digital dreamscapes where abandoned architecture is slowly reclaimed by lush, fictional ecosystems.

• Samantha Sethi — sculptor of future ruins in Fossil Futures, imagining the layered imprint of current environmental and technological systems in future geological strata.

• Cathy Cook — photographic storyteller chronicling the haunting stillness of decommissioned vehicles and machines in Life After Decay, capturing industrial stillness as ecological aperture.

Moderated by curator Liz Faust, this conversation will dig into themes such as:

• How artists document and amplify overlooked ecologies

• What it means to “rewild” imagination and urban space

• How archival practice intersects with environmental resilience

• How we hold memory in soil, seed, and speculative form

The panel invites artists, environmental thinkers, educators, and the public to consider what it means to repair, rather than rebuild—and how creative practice can lead us toward more reciprocal relationships with the land and each other.

Free and open to all. Watch it live on Youtube.