Reflection on What Happens After at BRIC

The final week to experience What Happens After at BRIC is here. This project has been a collective effort—an open invitation to reimagine the LMTV (Light Medium Tactical Vehicle) and its possibilities. By engaging with it as a site of transformation, participants have explored how we might reconfigure spaces originally designed for war into platforms for imagination, dialogue, and change. In an increasingly militarized world, this process has been an act of envisioning—an exercise in considering the futures we want to build together.

What Happens After asks difficult but necessary questions: What is the transformative potential we collectively hold? If we can alter the purpose of a single object embedded within a global ecosystem of violence, what else might be possible? Could larger coalitions of artists, activists, and communities work together to reshape the conditions that sustain systemic violence?

Throughout this project, artists, activists, ecologists, public space designers, and veterans—including Nicole Cheng, Angela Renee, Maria Hupfield, Fred Fleisher, Shelley Senter, and many others—have contributed to the re-visioning of the LMTV, transforming it into a site for performances, debates, movement, and reflection. Their work has been in conversation with thinkers like Stephanie Dinkins, Nic Kay, and Jaskiran Dhillon, who have considered a central question: How do we begin to imagine a world with less violence when we are rarely given the space to reflect on its many layers?

This iteration of What Happens After at BRIC was made possible by an incredible team, including curator Jenny Gerow, along with Sofia Salazar, Sol Nova, and Eva Ferrer. It builds upon a workshop held at MoMA’s Cullman Center in 2016, where a group of teenagers spent six weeks dismantling and rebuilding a military trailer from Iraq, exploring how we might live more regeneratively with objects designed for destruction.

The work continues. Transformation is never singular, nor is it finite—it is an ongoing process of questioning, reimagining, and collectively reshaping the world around us.