Inhuman matters: S-hell decay
Masen Al-Saghir
How can the lost stories of the displaced and the invisible ones, so intricate with the outdoors enthusiasts be shared when there are no spaces of encounter, no object testifying of their existence or experience? How is it possible to share these stories, create bridges between those realities and render them visible? Through an examination into the Arc’teryx LEAF (Law Enforcement & Armed Forces) jacket, my aim is to reveal the extractive infrastructures these outdoor gear/military products rely upon as well as how such material objects becomes part of broader geoolitcal landscapes and violence. How can we investigate these “interscalar” infrastructures with their fragmented temporal and spatial dimensions, which renders them almost impossible to grasp or comprehend? How can we visualise these architectures of separation and fragmentation and render the violence they produce as legible?
Vertical Violence on Infrastructural Nodes: A Situated Forensic Reading of Drone Strikes in Ethiopia
Tedros Belay
Between 2020 and 2022, the Ethiopian government deployed combat drones supplied by international allies as part of a broader military campaign in Tigray. Drones, often framed as precise, surgical technologies, were deployed in Tigray to reproduce a long-standing logic of targeting infrastructural nodes; The spatial intersection of material life, circulation, and social assemblage. This project investigates the spatial, temporal, and material dimensions of drone strikes by connecting to the historical targeting of marketplaces. It examines in detail the 16 December 2021 strike on the Alamata marketplace, integrating geolocated imagery, spatial analysis, and situated testimony to analyse how advanced aerial technologies extended established strategies of infrastructural destruction and spatial domination.
81129295: Material Conditions Towards Techno-authoritarianism
Michele Berardi
81129295 is the commercial code for germanium, a rare earth element crucial to infrared machine vision - making it a material condition of techno-authoritarianism. Germanium thus sits at the intersection of extractivism, logistics, and the military surveillance apparatus. This project places the element at its center, tracing its geographical and political trajectories through an attempt to reconstruct its supply chain. The analysis highlights three key moments: extraction as a site of environmental devastation and neocolonial value appropriation; logistics as the opaque “black box” of contemporary capitalism; and the material’s integration into complex military technologies such as drones - flagship expression of an ever-more militarised Fortress Europe. Ultimately, the project aims to expose the entangled connections among these dimensions (and the struggles they encompass), constituting an informative tool for imagining potential counter-logistical interventions.
RIACE –––––––––––––––– CAMINI On Building Spaces of Sanctuary
Giorgia Chiarion
On the so-called margins of Europe, villages such as Riace and Camini (Calabria, Italy) are gaining international recognition for their innovative migrant integration practices. By repurposing abandoned homes, they counter both national anti-immigration narratives and the effects of accelerating depopulation. Based on fieldwork conducted in April 2025, this project examines how these neighboring villages, each with about ~300 residents, offer contrasting political models. Camini reflects neoliberal governance through politically entrepreneurial actors, while Riace demonstrates a strong affinity with radical leftist movements and a commitment to disobedient political imaginaries. My methodology includes weave-walks: woven timelines created by collecting and assembling overlooked detritus at regular intervals during walks undertaken between these sites. The weavings propose alternative, embodied ways of knowing and trace a passage between two experiments in building Italy’s future amid ongoing colonial legacies and the threat of authoritarianism.
Landscapes of Struggle
Daniel Day
This project uses the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, the focal moment of the British State violently implementing neoliberalism, as an entry point to a spatial analysis of labour struggle in Britain. This work expands beyond Orgreave to examine how sites of struggle in 1984/5 act as temporal and spatial sensors (spatial hotspots) to register what the transformation of Britain has been, how this echoes through time and what the stakes are both now and in the future. Currently, the output is envisaged in a book form which will include my large format images of these areas, archival records, diagrams, my field notes, annotated notes and interviews.
Derogated Island: Sovereignty by Expulsion in France’s Colonial Continuum
Paola Perrin de Brichambaut
In 1974, the Comoros voted in favour of their independence after a century of French colonisation. Only one of the archipelago’s islands, Mayotte, voted against independence, leading to France’s continued claim to sovereignty over the territory. This claim remains contested in international law as the United Nations recognise the island as belonging to the Comoros. Over the past 10 years, 204 018 persons have been deported from Mayotte. The majority are Comorians, forcibly brought to the other Comoros islands by French authorities. The project investigates the actors, practices and infrastructures enabling these mass deportations. It seeks to establish the systematic nature of the attack on illegalised Comorians conducted by the French state and inscribes this violent condition in a French colonial continuum.
Fragment(ing) Infrastructures, Repair(ing) Futures: The Cielito Lindo BridgeThe Case of the “Cielito Lindo” Bridge
Fernanda Gómez Seoane
This project examines the irregularities surrounding the construction of a car bridge in the Natural Protected Area of Xochimilco, Mexico City. It begins with a lawsuit filed before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by residents, who accuse the government of violating multiple human rights to carry out the project. If the ruling is favourable, the plaintiffs demand the bridge’s removal and a genuine wetland restoration program. The project explores disrupted relations over time in the ancestral site of Lake Xochimilco, using the case of the bridge as an entry point to frame it as a symbol of a broader historical process of broken connections. This investigation critically examines who or what has benefited from the bridge’s construction, revealing the ongoing impacts of infrastructural violence and disconnection in the region. Building on this foundation, and returning to its point of entry, the project then shifts focus on the potential for reconnection by proposing alternative frameworks for thinking about repair.
Claire Grant
before it was yours, it was Mined is an investigation into the Anglo-Swiss multinational mining conglomerate Glencore. It aims to understand and represent the operations of the corporation through three key pillars: vertical integration, geographic dispersal, and subjugation. This approach contends with the massive international scale of the corporation and it’s critical and material local impacts. By denaturalising the tentacular infrastructure of extraction, and materialising the operation of legal and financial logics, the project analyses the specific mechanisms by which corporations like Glencore maintain their global dominance.
The Production of State-Space in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands
Alex Holding
This project considers the construction of the Haitian-Dominican borderlands as an emergent space of American empire in the early 20th Century, interrogating the various ways in which space becomes known, and therefore governed and remade. Specifically, I investigate how early 20th century US colonial knowledge production mobilises geospatial sciences — such as the emerging methods of ariel photography and cartographic production developed by the US Geological Survey – to interpret and represent spaces of colonial anticipation in the Pacific and Caribbean at the turn of the century, producing new forms of state territoriality, knowledge, and governance. Through spatial analysis, archival research, and forensic methodologies, I examine the role of highly racialised bureaucratic and geospatial sciences during the US’s concurrent occupations of Haiti (1915-34), and the DR (1916-1924) in the production of new spatial and legal realities within the Haitian-Dominican frontier, as well as investigating the legacies of such transformations in the present.
water[s] in motion
Ravza Kabaktepe
water[s] in motion is organised around three thresholds—ballasting, deballasting, and movement—examining ballast water as a logistical medium that both maintains and destroys planetary governance by mediating the uneven circulation of species, legal categories, and ecological dangers. Birdsong from a protected nesting area and container lift noise mingle together at Felixstowe, illustrating a complex contradiction where ongoing ecological damage brought on by industrial port operations is obscured by overlapping responsibilities within IMO [International Maritime Organization] and the corporate green actions of major logistics corporations—Maersk. Using kinds of water[s]—treated, invasive, and residual—the research explores how ballast operations turn water into a carrier of both life and policy, reflecting on its fragmentation across control and crisis regimes. Together, these elements propose ballast water as a spatial, ecological, and epistemological infrastructure.
Experimental Testing Grounds of Data Extraction: The Case of Samos Refugee Camp
Charikleia Kariofyli
In the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, Europe has been channelling resources into the development of new refugee camps and border management technologies. Greece, a focal “external border” in migration management, has already established new camps in the Aegean islands referred to as "hotspots," now renamed "Closed Controlled Access Centres." Disguised under the notion of safety, these infrastructures are designed to function as carceral environments, characterised by intense surveillance and policing. The implementation of advanced AI technologies raises significant concerns about individual privacy and the potential for targeted discrimination in the asylum application process, prompting critical questions about transparency, proportionality, and accountability. This research challenges the notion of "safety" by exploring the intersection of surveillance technologies, infrastructures, legislation, and the lived experiences within the Closed Controlled Access Centre on Samos Island.
Laboratory Loot
Verena Kämpken
Sleek new co-working laboratory spaces, marketed with cutting-edge equipment and resort-like amenities, invite life scientists — entrepreneurs and self-fashioned authorities alike – to define what it means to live. Bioinformatic research operates as quiet extraction, epistemic theft disguised as innovation. In a promotional collage from a luxury lab in London, an ancient temple-style column is spliced with a sterile test tube: a symbol of how (bio)techno-colonial futurity is stitched from the ruins of the past. Through fieldwork, collage, and curatorial practice, this project aims to conjure the temporal and narrative tensions between the spiritual, political, and economic realms from which laboratory imaginaries, infrastructures – and the mythic figure of the scientist – emerge. It asks: Is the laboratory an architectural machine for colonial world-building?
Station, Station, Station: Networks of Earthbound Sound
Tom Lye
The Bidston Observatory is a site of oceanic technique. Within resides a media archaeology of imperial sensing that renders the sea and the sky navigable, and thus, operational for human endeavour. Nowadays, the extra-terrestrial industrialisation of the deep sea and the exosphere builds on these technical objects and their cultural applications An exploration of these sense-making histories and their stationed infrastructures will be held in relation with the potential for contemporary artistic research that takes place on site today. Through an accumulative and polytemporal archive, this project sounds out stories of geology and weather, of science and fiction, of precision, subjectivity and incompleteness through audio essays, live conversation and palimpsest magazines.
Scalable Vision: Surveillance Imaging Technologies and Techno-solutionism in NHS Mental Health Care
Cáit McClay
This project investigates the deployment of body-worn cameras and Oxevision—a remote patient monitoring system that uses an infrared camera and sensors to monitor and track patients’ movements and vital signs—in NHS mental health units since 2018. These technologies expand the parameters of image-based surveillance performed by the NHS, incorporating previous blind spots in hospital spaces, such as bedrooms and bathrooms. Using the Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust as an entry point, I 3D model an acute inpatient ward to simulate scenarios mediated by these devices. Through this methodology, I trouble techno-solutionist, surveillance-based responses to systemic issues, such as understaffing, advocating instead for embodied, patient-centred approaches to mental health care. Through filmmaking, I interweave separate threads of my research, including 3D modelling, OSINT and interview.
Militarised Flow: Cable Infrastructures and Irish Security Assemblages
Éiméar McClay
This project investigates the incremental militarisation of Ireland’s maritime territory in relation to the securitisation of subsea cables. With seventy-five percent of transatlantic cables traversing Irish waters, Ireland has become a critical node in European defence against emerging forms of hybrid warfare. Tracing the AEC-2 cable as a key infrastructural vector, I map the military and private security architecture sustaining its transnational operations. Drawing on OSINT documents—including military tenders and planning permission filings—I spatialise AEC-2’s cabling and security infrastructure as a 3D-modelled landscape, which will be narrated through a scripted film. This methodology assembles a political biography of AEC-2—unfolding its emergence, governance and securitisation—as an epistemological probe into the meshwork of geopolitical, infrastructural and economic forces shaping Irish defence policy.
Flexible-Insecure: The Itinerant Migrant Worker in Germany
Laura-Isabela Meichsner
My project intends to shed light onGermany's labour migration regime by using the Covid 19 pandemic as an entry point. The pandemic marked a moment when the essential role of migrant workers from Eastern European countries in sustaining Germany’s economy and securing basic needs, particularly in sectors like agriculture and the meat industry became undeniably visible. However, this reliance on migrant labour is not a new development. Rather, it reflects a historical continuity that stretches back to the early 20th century. I want to prove that migrant itinerant labour in Germany originated in a state-regulated and institutionalised system that has existed for over a century. This system, while formalised in structure, has shaped precarious and unequal conditions for migrant workers and continues today as the model expands across multiple sectors.
What is in a Hotspot? Securitisation and Internal Bordering in Berlin´s "Danger Zones"
Jaya Mirani
In 2023 the Berlin Senate, together with the police, announced a new “security plan” for the City. Central part was the building of a fence around Görlitzer Park, intended to close the park during nighttime hours, coupled with increased police patrols and the installation of surveillance cameras. Through the lenses of securitisation theory, moral panic narratives, and internal border regimes, this dissertation investigates how the state, media and police co-produce these areas as symbolic epicenters of crime, legitimising expanded surveillance, racial profiling, and spatial exclusion. These zones disproportionately target racialised and marginalised communities, mirroring broader European trends in internal bordering and racialised policing practices. Complementing this critical theoretical framework, a practice-based audio walk entering on Görlitzer Park as a case study. Collecting community testimonies, activist insights, and lived experiences of residents subjected to systematic police checks and surveillance, the audio walk acts as a form of embodied counter-mapping. Participants physically traverse this stigmatised zones, while engaging with narratives that challenge the dominant discourse, reclaiming that space from it’s narratives of fear.
Infrastructures of Exclusion: The Materialisation of Hostile Policy
Finn O’Keefe
This project contends that the 2024 UK riots were a physical manifestation of the ‘hostile environment’, focusing on the use of hotels as accommodation for asylum seekers. It examines how these spaces operate within the UK’s border regime – both as sites of confinement and as tools that signal who belongs and who does not. Presented as a video essay, the project situates this aspect of the border spectacle within the longer history of state policy and populist rhetoric. It explores the conditions that render these hotels volatile, analysing how austerity and privatisation created proxies for racist violence. Though framed by the state as spaces of sanctuary, they are spaces that exclude and hyper-visibilise those forced to reside in them.
De / hydrating Cuitzeo
Bernal Pérez
This research project aims to redefine what constitutes a lake by examining Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico’s second-largest body of water, in the context of drought, extraction, and environmental neglect. The project challenges static, Western definitions by tracing the lake’s volatile geologic history and increasingly extreme cycles of contraction and expansion. Through GIS mapping, fieldwork, interviews, and theoretical engagement with Astrida Neimanis and Dilip Da Cunha, the work reframes the lake as a process shaped by wetness, transformation, and political forces. On one hand, it explores the lake as part of a hydrocommons, extending its boundaries through gradients of wetness and interdependent bodies. On the other, it confronts the structural and political mechanisms behind its desiccation, including extractive infrastructure, terraforming, and state negligence. Rather than a disappearing object, Lake Cuitzeo emerges as a contested terrain where ecological fragility, infrastructural violence, and historical memory converge to expose the layered politics of water in contemporary Mexico.
Counter-logistical Landscapes: The Nicaraguan Case
Simona Pérez
This project examines the co-production of collective memory through the agency of a mundane object: the concrete paving block (adoquín). Focusing on Nicaragua, it analyses two periods of state violence to question entrenched left/right political binaries. Creating a cross between (counter)logistical theories and new materialist philosophies, it conceptualises the adoquín as a mnemo-technical pharmakon object—both an instrument of communal road building and a tactical disruptor of capitalist flows. Its spatial becoming from horizontal infrastructure to vertical barricades exposes tensions and contradictions within the state’s proclaimed Socialist, Christian, and Solidaristic ethos, exposing its entanglement with the capitalist empire it condemns. The analysis draws on audiovisual documentation, architectural diagrams, and cartographic representations to show how this technical object exceeds its utilitarian function, becoming a political actor and material witness of state violence. In doing so, it demonstrates how the building environment from the global peripheral contexts acquires unanticipated mnemonic and political roles in struggles against authoritarian governance.
A Cinema of Retrieval
Xavier Pillai
n 1965, the third OAU conference took place in Accra, in the penultimate year of socialist Ghana’s first republic. The conference was filmed and choreographed by the GFIC, creating a pan-African and statist media aimed at rejecting the language of imperialist film. The project engages these films through a spatial historiography of film. Examining the history of the OAU, the politics of these images, and the neocolonial legacies of film that facilitate the transfer and displacement of these films into private archives in Britain today. By making these heritage images an evidentiary tool, we extend their potency, asserting that the recombination of these images with their original custodians and through creative interventions, we can extend the practice of restitution and repatriation that has so far been limited to physical objects and public spheres.
Towards a Metalanguage of Conservation
Oskar Pollack
This project revolves around the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It analyses the timely narratives that structure its spatial politics and how, alongside, matter and subjectivity is reconfigured. To think about the epistemic and material violence that unfolds in the museum, this project investigates the material conditions of the objects housed within the collection. The museum's work focuses around a series of key acts that are meticulously protocolled. It manages objects as inert matter for preservation. Conservation practices such as disinfection with heavy metals, cleaning with nitrogen tanks, and storing in sealed chambers chemically reconfigures objects for their ostensible protection. Objects are kept under strict environmental controls, which are calibrated according to precise temperature and humidity standards not supported by hard scientific evidence but conventions. Such conditions produce a fiction of permanence, wherein conservation seeks to arrest the passage of time, thereby creating lethal objects, toxic to human contact.
Eroded Ecologies: Sensing Soils, Seas, and Plants in Venetian Lagoonal Landscapes
Riccardo Rizzetto
Starting from the Purple Artichoke of Sant’Erasmo, the research unfolds as an analysis of the multiple actors entangled in the making and unmaking of the Venetian Lagoon. The Purple Artichoke of Sant’Erasmo — an ambiguous symbol of Venice, both delicacy and remnant of an agricultural past — acts as a living palimpsest, tracing colonial, migratory, and commercial histories while revealing current environmental and social frictions. This becomes the entry point to understand the Lagoon as a co-authored environment, approached through its layered relationships made of human and more-than-human agencies, agricultural remnants, infrastructural impositions, and climate urgencies that co-exist and co-constitute one another. Through its various activations and forms, the project proposes a counter-narrative rooted in situated sensing methodologies, fostering practices of sympoiesis to give voice to the more-than-human and to challenge crystallised, anthropocentric representations.
A Mytho-Political Lament
Sofia Rudi Kent
Through an investigation of the spectacles of infrastructure in Southern Italy (from the 1950s to the present) I aim to understand how state backed projects have been instrumentalised to perpetuate cycles of marginalisation and othering in the Mezzogiorno. My focus is on how law and infrastructure work in tandem as mythological tools, allowing the state to claim, expropriate, extract, and devastate territory under the guise of national development and progress. This spatial and legal condition has produced a legal state of emergency, littered with graveyards of cement and steel which not only mark economic failure but also contribute visually and symbolically to the myth of the South as an abandoned, inert space, devoid of organised social life. Such representations make top-down domination and intervention more palatable, even necessary, in the eyes of the state. The primary site of this inquiry is the Strait of Messina Bridge project—long contested, still unrealised. Through it I ask: How has the production of unfinished or never-begun infrastructure in Southern Italy served as a mechanism of capitalist expansion, legal expropriation, and myth-making? What kinds of power are exercised by a suspended, speculative megaproject, even when it never fulfills its intended purpose?
Architectures of Transition
Andrés Felipe Ruiz
Architectures of Transition explores post-war life conditions of former combatants in Colombia. From being visible through the eyes of the state's military gaze, to becoming legible following their transition into civilian life, exguerrilleros and exparamilitares have embodied a liminal condition within which they created expectations, forms of dwelling and different ways of inhabiting a new reality in the face of a promissory future. The project primarily is focused on the spatial, infrastructural and architectural dimensions of the Territorial Spaces for Training and Reincorporation (ETCR for its acronym in Spanish) in Colombia. The ETCRs were built following the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the former FARC-EP guerrilla in 2016, with the aim of being transitional spaces for two main purposes: the disarmament process and the initial reincorporation of peace signatories. Amidst the discussions towards better ways to transit from war to peace, Colombia has deployed -since the 1980´s- different approaches to deal with the lives of those who once belonged to an armed group within approaches that have move across ideas of reinsertion, reintegration and reincorporation. The project also reflects on these legal grammars and imaginations from a conceptual history perspective.
Destruction Shall be our Inventory
Laura Dominique Russell
This project interrogates the possibilities of 'radical un-conservation' – a concept proposed by artist Dan Guthrie to describe the process of acquiring an object with the intention of destroying it. The destructive potential of radical un-conservation is here applied to the museum's growing utilisation of 3D technologies which are understood as the latest milestone in the museum's regime of incessant progress and kleptomania. The project explores the possibilities for resistance against the museum's hoarding and preservation practices, using the OBJ's file structure (the file type used to store the spatial data of 3D models produced via photogrammetry) as its key site of intervention. By undertaking its own radical un-conservation work, the project grapples with the question: what to do with a history that should not exist?
Storage Almost Full: Wasted Landscapes of Madrid
Manu Sancho
This project examines the politics of waste in Madrid’s southeast periphery, where intersecting infrastructures—solid waste, data storage, and CO2 sequestration— overlap. Waste management is no longer limited to garbage or industrial residues but has become the everyday framework for processing and organising information. By defamiliarising the cloud storage interface of digital devices, the project returns to the material landscapes that underlie this metaphor. In this peripheral zone, municipal, construction, and demolition waste accumulate alongside marginalised populations that are treated as similarly expendable. At the same time, national initiatives to expand data centres and explore carbon storage in a local saline aquifer further entrench this region as a site of containment. The research reveals how waste infrastructures legitimise ongoing extraction while externalising their ecological and social consequences.
Films of Speculation / Films of Dispossession
Ishbel Tunnadine
This project examines value, land speculation and asset management in the urban landscape of a financialised London, through films shot on brownfield sites that were rented out as filming locations ‘in the meantime’ before development. My research centres on two locations: Millenium Mills, a disused factory in East London, and Elephant Park (formerly the Heygate Estate), both of which are owned by the global developer and asset manager, Lendlease. Though their trajectories differ, both sites are two sides of the same speculative process: one of future promise, the other of dispossession. The films shot at these sites - often detective shows or police dramas - are ‘fictional’, yet they go beyond mere representations. The material conditions in which these films exist, (speculation and/or dispossession) are inscribed within their very production. Using editing as a methodology, I isolate frames where the buildings comes into view to understand how these images are embedded in speculative processes. I’m interested in how value is constructed and extracted - particularly through vague legislative terms like brownfield – once used to demarcate post-industrial ‘vacant’ land, but increasingly used to justify residential displacement.
Asset-Manager Society: Railway Arches in Hackney
Antonio Voce
In March 2025, Blackstone Inc. – the largest commercial landlord in history – finalised a deal to take full control of a £2bn portfolio of more than 5,000 UK railway arches, buying out the partner with whom it jointly acquired them from the publicly owned Network Rail five years earlier. The deal symbolises the advancement of offshore private equity in the UK, a further expansion of what Brett Christophers describes as asset-manager society: a reality in which asset managers increasingly own and control the essential housing and physical infrastructure underpinning daily life. Using a multi-scalar timeline as a method of inquiry, and the railway arches of Hackney as the unit of analysis, my research attempts to expose the ways in which the financialisation of infrastructure, commercial space, and housing hollows out the public realm through alternating cycles of emptiness and “refurbishment”– a debt-driven, rinse-and-repeat process for which the term gentrification is perhaps no longer adequate.
Counter-Planning from the Drone Kitchen
Aya Wazaz
In March 2025, NATO awarded Palantir a contract for its Maven Smart System, an Al-enabled battlefield platform co-developed with the U.S. Department of Defense. As a company specialized in software, Palantir's operations often evade visibility. This project renders them legible by laying bare Palantir's reliance on Ukrainian civilian-produced drones to train its software, effectively outsourcing hardware labour. This project undertakes a digital ethnography of Ukraine's techno-military DIY drone building subculture to reveal the labour behind Al military infrastructures.
This process is understood as a mode of generative entrenchment, increasing reliance on private corporations and facilitating extraction of data alongside old-school extractivism of Ukraine's rare earth minerals. In this frame, Ukraine's conflict becomes reproductive- a war used to wage further war.