Junkyard explores the accumulated car wrecks as archaeological remains for the future - a future that is undergirded by the consumptive cultures of petroleum, rare earth minerals and metals of which the car is emblematic.

Paul Virilio’s argument about the relationship of technology and accidents is illuminating in this sense: “every time that a new technology has been invented”, he writes “a new energy harnessed, a new product made, one also invents a new negativity, a new accident.”(1) In this sense, the easy conclusion would say that the people who invented the car also invented the car accident. But what happens, when we think about not individual accidents but the industry as a whole as an extended scale of a systematic accident that leaves traces of wrecks as the memory of past archaeological periods, whether that pertains to chemicals, metals or residual traces of media of past automobile cultures? In other words, what if we think that the whole industry, with production, distribution, excavation and use, and what it has been doing to the earth’s “resources”, the organisation of labour and gender roles, is an historical accident that undermines the viability of organised human existence – the car industry as the accident of the fossil fuel culture?

Jussi Parikka et Yig˘it Soncul.

(1) : Critical Mass," World Art, no. 1 (1995), 81. (1) : Critical Mass," World Art, no. 1 (1995), 81.