Chance Ecologies is a framework for artistic gestures and research projects exploring the un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites, and landfills. The main trajectories of the project are to create research and discourse around the value of wild spaces in the urban environment; to document, learn from, and commemorate the naturally occurring ecosystems that are being lost to development; and to articulate contemporary readings of and new forms of relating to urban wilderness.

The participating artists  of Chance Ecologies will be exploring the nuanced relationships to wilderness and the larger concepts of the human-nature relationship embedded at the initial project site with a range of mediums and artistic practices, including photo and video documented performance, various forms of mapping and archaeology, sound recording and broadcasting, species identification, participatory actions, and low-impact site-specific installations.

Research themes include: contemporary readings of wilderness and the human relation to nature, post-human / post-industrial ecologies, the unplanned / un-designed landscape, accidental playgrounds and socially undefined spaces, embedded histories of the site, fields of knowledge / the land as pedagogy, wild spaces as part of an urban ecology.

Chance Ecologies is produced in affiliation with Amplifier Inc. – a nonprofit organization using art and design as tools of urban transformation and city-making. Amplifier creates programs that connect public and private groups with the global art and design field to bring the most innovative work to under-served groups and smaller communities around the country, where it can have the greatest possible resonance.

Chance Ecologies is hosted by Radiator Gallery, which is acting as project hub for parallel programming in August and hosting an exhibition of the resulting works and artistic site research from December 17, 2015 to January 22, 2016.