Madeleine Ruggi (b.1991) is an artist living and working between London, UK, and Rotterdam, NL. Being situated between Europe’s largest port (Rotterdam) and an international cross roads (London) has shaped Ruggi’s artistic practice, which seeks to grasp her own body’s position among infrastructures of trade and processing that are often concealed to consumers of the global West. Madeleine’s practice uses conversations, site visits, radio communications, field recordings, found and gifted objects as well as steel, collage and print to ask how she can responsibly engage with the world in which she lives, understanding how decisions in her immediate setting may impact the world at large.
Her often ordinary and small-scale materials — a slice of ship exterior, a VHF radio scanner or a piece of wire mesh fencing —literally embody a fragment of gargantuan, often unseen industries. These act as departure points for Madeleine to confront the cycle of trade and consumption that she too is inextricably involved in. Her direct, bodily engagement with these loaded materials connects states of desire with demand, as well as with the macro-constructs of mediation and power that serve them.