Research Agency
Public Forum 24 September - 1 October 2026
︎︎︎ PDF of WEEKEND SCHEDULE
RESEARCH AGENCY
It can seem naive to believe research has agency as crises erupt and unfold at unprecedented scales across the planet and as critical humanistic education is besieged by a political economy that no longer tolerates dissent. (Goldsmiths is under its third round of management-directed staffing cuts in five years, and CRA staff have not been paid for several months). Through this exhibition we do nonetheless insist that research has agency and that it is possible—with a network of support—to make forays into today’s ubiquitous brutality without becoming coarse, exhausted or losing sight of other horizons.
This Public Forum emerges out of the MA Research Architecture student cohort 2025-26. It is not simply a presentation of individual research projects, it is rather an assembly of concerns, that we have navigated collectively. Instead of an exhibition, we hold a forum: not a room in which merely to look projects, but a space in which to speak.
We speak up about both distant and close struggles and how they relate to here, now, and one another. We also take a stance against the growing global educational crisis, which has directly affected our university, degree programme, staff and students.
We stand in solidarity with the strike action against Goldsmiths’ restructuring program and hope to open up this space to showcase and workshop how to navigate hardship both near and far, together.
PUBLIC FORUM // Programme
Thursday 24 September 5-9pm Public Forum launch “Research Agency”
Location: St James Hatcham With fritters and relaxing drinks provided by Kelapa Gading
SOFA TALK
Thursday 24 September 5pm
Goldsmiths' Future?
We bring our studio sofa to the picket line for a conversation about the institutional crisis caused by the "Future Goldsmiths" restructuring programme. Guests include Free Goldsmiths, the Goldsmiths University and College Union, and CRA students and staff.
Location: St James Hatcham
ACTIVATION WEEKEND
Saturday 26-27 September
We speak up about both distant and close struggles and how they relate to here, now, and one another. We also take a stance against the growing global educational crisis, which has directly affected our university, degree programme, staff and students.
We stand in solidarity with the strike action against Goldsmiths’ restructuring program and hope to open up this space to showcase and workshop how to navigate hardship both near and far, together.
PUBLIC FORUM // Programme
Thursday 24 September 5-9pm Public Forum launch “Research Agency”
Location: St James Hatcham With fritters and relaxing drinks provided by Kelapa Gading
SOFA TALK
Thursday 24 September 5pm
Goldsmiths' Future?
We bring our studio sofa to the picket line for a conversation about the institutional crisis caused by the "Future Goldsmiths" restructuring programme. Guests include Free Goldsmiths, the Goldsmiths University and College Union, and CRA students and staff.
Location: St James Hatcham
ACTIVATION WEEKEND
Saturday 26-27 September
Hanen Nina Abbas
The architecture of Abu Ghraib reflects a layered history of Western dominance, transforming a site once intended for Saddam’s regime control into a symbol of international controversy over human rights. The prison was reportedly designed by an American architect Edmund Whiting in the 1950’s with the assistance of British engineers. Abu Ghraib became a paradigm of colonial-influence of carceral infrastructure, built into its tall and colossal concrete walls, a layout crafted for surveillance, and fortified perimeters for its intention of mass containment and incarceration.
Under Saddam Hussein, the complex was expanded and weaponized as a mechanism of state repression, evolving architectural control into a system of political violence. After the fall of the regime and beginning of Western occupation, the prison became a meticulous imperialist carceral logic, allowing occupiers to carry out violence, abuse and torture that transcends beyond international and national borders. Although there are several reports from the U.S. Army CID, human rights organisations and journalistic investigations regarding what took place in Abu Ghraib. These reports lack spatial clarity and timeline of specific events tied back to the perpetrators in the photographs and their camera’s. Most reports focused on 3 or 4 perpetrators, others did not clarify the chain of command and relationships with private contractors. The goal of this research aims to produce a reconstruction of the cell blocks, spatialising Ali’s testimony, identifying the camera’s and timeline of events, and to contribute to accountability work. All material used for this research has been recreated and gathered from open source data, articles, videos, leaked photos and a official testimony translated from Arabic to English given by Ali Shallal by virtue of the provisions of the Statutory Declarations Act 1960 during his time in Amman, Jordan.
Under Saddam Hussein, the complex was expanded and weaponized as a mechanism of state repression, evolving architectural control into a system of political violence. After the fall of the regime and beginning of Western occupation, the prison became a meticulous imperialist carceral logic, allowing occupiers to carry out violence, abuse and torture that transcends beyond international and national borders. Although there are several reports from the U.S. Army CID, human rights organisations and journalistic investigations regarding what took place in Abu Ghraib. These reports lack spatial clarity and timeline of specific events tied back to the perpetrators in the photographs and their camera’s. Most reports focused on 3 or 4 perpetrators, others did not clarify the chain of command and relationships with private contractors. The goal of this research aims to produce a reconstruction of the cell blocks, spatialising Ali’s testimony, identifying the camera’s and timeline of events, and to contribute to accountability work. All material used for this research has been recreated and gathered from open source data, articles, videos, leaked photos and a official testimony translated from Arabic to English given by Ali Shallal by virtue of the provisions of the Statutory Declarations Act 1960 during his time in Amman, Jordan.
Moving Ground
Isla Amin
When livelihood, ancestry and culture are inseparable from land, what happens when mining comes to swallow it? The ground beneath Kiruna, Sweden has been shifting for some time. As mining operations dig deeper into the earth, soil is churned into new formations, altered configurations. Slowly the land has been sinking, old attachments dissolving as places disappear. Now Sweden wants to open another extractive mouth that will eat into the last remaining reindeer migration route of Sámi herders of the Gabna community – severing their access point between seasonal grounds and with it, the ability to continue traditional practice that grounds cultural identity, ancestry and the passing of knowledge to generations to come. Looking into Sweden’s attempt to sever Sámi practice from the land, this project visualises two sensibilities in contention – the indigenous and the extractive. Tracing lost lands, enduring ecological violence and impending land use threats, the work follows the last migration route of the Gabna community – questioning why it has become their last, and which logics now threaten to sever it entirely.
When Matter Looses its State
Bushra Aumir
Toxic Persistence, Jurisdictional Ambiguity, and the Dissolution of Liability
This project argues that the changing state of matter is not a neutral physical process but a mechanism through which legal responsibility is diluted, making it harder to hold corporations and states to account. It takes the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal and its forty-year aftermath as a template rather than an exception. It follows the contamination as it moves from gas to soil, from soil into groundwater, and finally into ash. With each change in material form, harm became harder to attribute, measure and act upon. The gas had a source and a company. The groundwater had neither a boundary nor a custodian. The 2025 incineration at Pithampur was declared remediation, yet it addressed less than one percent of the stored waste. The project combines forensic mapping, litigation records, scientific monitoring data and an essayistic voiceover across a 50-minute investigative film essay. It asks what happens to responsibility when the evidence of harm changes form faster than the law can follow it, and it holds that what is not represented is not actionable.
This project argues that the changing state of matter is not a neutral physical process but a mechanism through which legal responsibility is diluted, making it harder to hold corporations and states to account. It takes the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal and its forty-year aftermath as a template rather than an exception. It follows the contamination as it moves from gas to soil, from soil into groundwater, and finally into ash. With each change in material form, harm became harder to attribute, measure and act upon. The gas had a source and a company. The groundwater had neither a boundary nor a custodian. The 2025 incineration at Pithampur was declared remediation, yet it addressed less than one percent of the stored waste. The project combines forensic mapping, litigation records, scientific monitoring data and an essayistic voiceover across a 50-minute investigative film essay. It asks what happens to responsibility when the evidence of harm changes form faster than the law can follow it, and it holds that what is not represented is not actionable.
Luis Beyerbach
“Across Germany groups of far-right extremist settlers have been buying up property. Behind theirfacade of closeness to nature, ecological lifestyles and alleged pagan tradition, a harshpolitical agenda and network lurk. Some rural towns have become meeting grounds and safe havensfor right-wing festivals, nationalist gatherings and racist esotericism. This project investigates howgroups of settlers have accumulated properties in towns to dominate local politics.Two cases of land accumulation by settlers of the Anastasia cult movement shed lighton one form of far-right spatial politics on Germany’s countryside.”
Phenology of Dispossession
Ana C. Correa-Sánchez
This project examines the logics behind the replication and repetition of patterns over time, specifically the patterns of land accumulation and dispossession tied to agribusiness in Colombia. Through a review of financial, spatial and generational evidence, it traces how oil palm monoculture replicates, grows and expands across the territory, and how oligarchic genealogies, trade guilds, corporations and transnational capital intertwine to seize and maintain control over land as a commodity within a specific regime of exploitation. Like the palm itself, these social, economic and political practices draw their strength from uniformity and repetition, and they falter the moment the land is reconfigured according to other logics and ways of life.
Water without Water, Reeds without Reeds s
Jay Darlington
What does it mean to restore the visible parts of an ecosystem without securing the processes that sustain them? This research project traces a century of attempts to reorganise the wetlands of southern Iraq, from irrigation and drainage schemes to international restoration programmes. Across these projects, maps, plans and images externally define what the marsh should become. Combining archival research, fieldwork and GIS mapping, the project examines restoration as a political and technical intervention. It asks whether the return of water and vegetation has also restored the conditions that sustained Ahwari life in the marshes. At the water’s edge, reeds and salt-tolerant shrubs register an adapted ecology. Following water and salt through the ground and plants, the investigation asks what these conditions can now sustain: what can be built, woven and fed. Read alongside the archive, the present landscape records changes that began long before restoration and continue beneath its surface.
Hidden Cargo
Gbor Friesen
This project investigates claims from Rwandan media that the Belgian government is providing covert military aid to the DRC government. Smuggling allegations are hard to prove. The act can be hidden in a sea of legal movements. However, every physical act, including smuggling, leaves traces. This project analyses Belgian Air Force flights in an attempt to identify the presence of these traces in Central Africa. It identifies the patterns that these movements form. Through the creation of patterns, it becomes possible to identify deviations. These deviations are investigated in an attempt to identify potential cases of covert military aid. Analysing these patterns and deviations may allow conclusions to be drawn about the activities they represent, even when no hard evidence can be found. While this project cannot prove or disprove the different allegations, it sheds light on the likeliness of each of them.Finding hard evidence is difficult because the cargo can often only be spotted on satellite imagery. Due to the resolution, it is hard to identify what the cargo actually is. The dissertation investigates this problem by proposing a new methodology to identify objects on low resolution imagery.
Asset Ecologies
Frederik Germer
London’s environmental conservation regime seeks to protect the city’s ecosystems through the economic integration of non-human life. The unit of choice is the ‘natural capital asset.’ The translation of an environment into an asset is a process of (e)valuation according to anthropocentric metrics. It requires the definition, categorization, surveillance, modelling, and management of an ecosystem’s constituent parts. It is an essentializing violence that draws boundaries through that which exists only in relation, imposing stability and predictability onto the constant flux of the natural world. Conservation becomes a mechanism through which state and corporation together capture biological growth in the name of economic growth. The tools of the trade are fundamentally colonial and precarious humans and plants here and elsewhere suffer the consequences, which range from gentrification to extraction. The politics of visibility is key in contesting this conservation project: how is it possible to argue for the importance of living spatial assemblages that we cannot (for)see? Through the right to opacity, we might replace conservation with reservation.
Afterlives of Fire
Elpida Giannakou
This project investigates how transformations in emergency governance, post-fire recovery and forest management are reshaping fire regimes in Greece amid climate change and the enduring effects of austerity. By treating the 2021 fires as a conjunctural moment, the project shifts attention from fire as a spectacular and singular event to the administrative, financial and spatial mechanisms that precede it and unfold in its aftermath. It examines how newly introduced policies intended to manage wildfire risk redistribute responsibility, authority, labour and access, while displacing forms of situated knowledge and producing new dependencies on private expertise and capital. Reading each aftermath of fire as also the beforehand of a future one, the project asks how these interventions transform the conditions through which fire-prone landscapes are governed, accessed and valued.
Antifascaist Accounting
Asher Gibson
Between 30th July and 6th August 2024, towns and cities throughout the UK faced the largest wave of riots and counter-architectural violence the country has seen since the 2011 police killing of Mark Duggan. The popular narrative attributed the riots to a public disinformation campaign falsely attributing the murders of three young girls in Southport to a Muslim asylum seeker, spread through networks of fascist Telegram chats and other communication streams.
1280 individuals were arrested for direct involvement, the channel responsible for the disinformation investigated for cyberterrorism, and the ‘Terrorgram Collective’ sanctioned in the UK. However, despite the apparent will of the British state, far right influencers responsible for defending the violence on the open internet evaded material consequences.
‘Antifascist Accounting’ seeks to answer why this accountability gap manifested using the case study of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—one of the country’s most prominent, financially and socially connected far-right influencers. It seeks to answer four research questions, each shaped around the separate levels of the criminal justice system: 1) Why was Lennon allowed to leave UK jurisdiction under investigation for other offences, and thus able to justify the violence of his followers with impunity? 2) How is incitement to riot legally determined in UK law, and to what extent could it be applied to Lennon? 3) If a claim for damages were brought against all those involved (including and beyond influencers), what would the cumulative sum be? 4) Pressing beyond state methods of accountability, what vulnerabilities can be identified within far-right financial and social networks, and how can they be used to undermine their power?
‘Antifascist Accounting’ seeks to answer why this accountability gap manifested using the case study of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—one of the country’s most prominent, financially and socially connected far-right influencers. It seeks to answer four research questions, each shaped around the separate levels of the criminal justice system: 1) Why was Lennon allowed to leave UK jurisdiction under investigation for other offences, and thus able to justify the violence of his followers with impunity? 2) How is incitement to riot legally determined in UK law, and to what extent could it be applied to Lennon? 3) If a claim for damages were brought against all those involved (including and beyond influencers), what would the cumulative sum be? 4) Pressing beyond state methods of accountability, what vulnerabilities can be identified within far-right financial and social networks, and how can they be used to undermine their power?
Copper is not the New Green
Lola Guiguilé
This research situates the Nussir copper mine in Repparfjord (Norway), which is set to expand under Canadian ownership by September 2027, within a broader regime of extractivism. This work asks how colonial continuity is erased by (yet actively embedded within) geopolitical "green" future strategies. Drawing on roughly 150 archival documents spanning more than 120 years of copper exploration and mining activities, this investigation traces the bureaucratic life of the extraction site: how it is written into existence, justified, and rewritten across shifting political climates. The data is not treated as a static record, but as a living archive: mapped, cross-read, turned against itself, and reimagined. In solidarity with the socio-environmental struggle Repparfjord is facing, while also understanding the case study as a node in broader systemic eco-political violence.
The findings led to an essay and a dissertation, the conclusions of which were built upon a research archive entitled ‘Cartography of Toxic Legacy’. Whilst the essays in ‘Copper is not the New Green’ discuss how regulation, as promoted by the green transition lobby, obscures the socio-ecological impacts of raw material extraction, the archive tool reveals what is being concealed: that the Nussir mine is neither a new mining project nor a promising prospect for a green future, but rather an expansion and continuation – not only of the infrastructure of previous mining activities, but also of the beneficiaries and corporate involvement.
The findings led to an essay and a dissertation, the conclusions of which were built upon a research archive entitled ‘Cartography of Toxic Legacy’. Whilst the essays in ‘Copper is not the New Green’ discuss how regulation, as promoted by the green transition lobby, obscures the socio-ecological impacts of raw material extraction, the archive tool reveals what is being concealed: that the Nussir mine is neither a new mining project nor a promising prospect for a green future, but rather an expansion and continuation – not only of the infrastructure of previous mining activities, but also of the beneficiaries and corporate involvement.
Contested PowerContested Power
Eliesta Handitya
This research is carried out in collaboration with Institut Mosintuwu, a civic organisation in Tentena city, Poso, Central Sulawesi. They focus on advocacy for women in the Poso post-conflict and the collective struggle against land/water extractivism in the Poso area.
Access the Platform here
This project examines the development of mega hydropower infrastructure in Poso, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, facilitated by the intervention of the oligarch family through large-scale hydrodam projects initiated in 2005. These developments have resulted in significant environmental degradation in the region. The construction of PLTA Poso 1 (2012), PLTA Poso 2 (2005), and the dredging of the lake outlet over a 12.8 kilometres stretch from the lake’s outlet toward the river (commenced in 2019) serve as the primary focal points for this spatial investigation. Using counter-impact analysis as its primary method, the research begins with the available Environmental Impact Analysis Report (ANDAL) of a massive river bed dredging under “Poso River Improvement”, in which technical framing legitimise the socio-ecological violence experienced by local and Pamona Indigenous communities in the Poso hydroecology. In this research, opacity and the absence of documents become evidence of violence, and its missing archives is a starting point for countermapping the socioecological violence. Through community testimony and ethnographic groundtruthing, it brings spatial evidence into dialogue with lived experience, by revealing losses, memories, and collective resistance that official planning records do not register.
Everyday Landscape Vol. 2
Eli Harrell
PDF of Dissertation
The research project consists of an analytical text, Accomplice/Activist: Technopolitics on Computation’s Homefront, and a documentary film, Everyday Landscape Vol. 2 (102 mins).
Examining the military-tech complex from within its Northern Virginia homeland, Continuity of Operations is a long duration of the present data center boom. While the 2026 US elections have framed this as a populist conflict, this project argues that data centers do not interrupt but facilitate suburban life, and in turn compromise the activism of their local opponents. The blank hum of this infrastructure appears without historical context almost everywhere else it crops up as a sonic disavowal of time beyond “uptime”. But in Virginia, where current AWS-centric cloud first came online, computation cannot hide from its heritage. Here, each new data center upturns the soil under which the industry’s immediate substrate of Cold War tech lies: subterranean phone lines between relocation bunkers for a nuclear-blasted Washington persist as rights-of-way multiplexed in fiber. Here, LLM tokens are generated in facilities built on assemblages composed of fragments of plantations splintered by 161 years of partible inheritance. Current property lines, I was told, tend to be historic. Continuity of Operations is a creature of the field.
“For Your Safety”
Charles Ingea
In its latest wars on Lebanon, Israel has issued over 670 civilian evacuation orders — messages posted on social media that have warned people of impending military action against their building, neighbourhood, town, or city. “FOR YOUR SAFETY” builds an archive of these evacuation orders in an attempt to evidence some of the military strategies deployed in Israel’s occupation of Lebanon. The project finds that under the guise of safeguarding civilian life, evacuation orders have been used to legitimise any form of attack on civilians and civilian objects, to remotely police and control the movement of people across Lebanese territory, and to dispossess Lebanese civilians in the name of permanent securitisation.
Starlink Launch Webcast with a Guest Commentator, Law
Sae Jung Oh
There are approximately 15,692 active satellites in low Earth orbit alone as of September 2026. The structure of the industry is extremely monopolised, despite restrictions under international space law. The United States of America owns 75% of all active satellites, of which 88.9% are owned by SpaceX. Driven by plans to outsource data centres to orbit, this number is projected to grow into the millions in the near future, with a critical environmental impact on the planet. Starlink Launch Webcast with a Guest Commentator, Law is a spatial investigation into thisimbalanced structure, reading orbit as both pathway and territory. The research is conducted through an interdisciplinary methodology combining theatrical text analysis. The script was written using a methodology borrowed from documentary theatre, in which factual events are treated as readymades or found objects, the script is regarded as a museum for display, and the author takes on the role of editor or curator. The final output takes the form of a script and its activation as a script reading. Video documentation of the script reading plays on a loop on the monitor and in the five-channel video screening.
The Jurisdiction of the Street
Michalis Karamichalis
Access the Platform here
The platform remains open, so that others can add their own unrecorded experiences and help build a counter-archive.
Over the last decade, countries across Europe have passed laws that limit or criminalise the right to protest, dictating where people can gather, when and how. The project brings this legislation together and compares how different countries regulate the right to take to the streets. In Greece, since 2025, a law protecting the monument in front of Parliament has made gathering there a criminal offence. It follows a 2020 law that requires protests to be announced in advance and allows the authorities to restrict, reroute or ban them. Using the police’s own published decisions, the project maps hundreds of these restrictions across Athens.
What emerges is a city of lines. But the official record is incomplete. Some restrictions were enforced on the streets and never published. A line that leaves no document cannot be traced, and what cannot be traced cannot be contested. The project sets out to find these missing lines by turning to the people who were there, through interviews with lawyers and legal experts, activists, collectives and protesters. Their testimonies are rebuilt in three-dimensional space, making visible the effects of an everyday repression that works in plain sight and still goes unnoticed.
What emerges is a city of lines. But the official record is incomplete. Some restrictions were enforced on the streets and never published. A line that leaves no document cannot be traced, and what cannot be traced cannot be contested. The project sets out to find these missing lines by turning to the people who were there, through interviews with lawyers and legal experts, activists, collectives and protesters. Their testimonies are rebuilt in three-dimensional space, making visible the effects of an everyday repression that works in plain sight and still goes unnoticed.
Monocultures of Faith
Amanda Klajner
Image: The Jamamadi Indigenous village seen from above, under North American missionary presence since the 1960s, with an archival evangelical recruitment image laid over it.
The project consists of a Dissertation and an Investigative Report.
With special thanks to Daniel Cangussu, whose collaboration and support were essential to this project.
This project is a spatial investigation of evangelical missionary infrastructure in the Brazilian Amazon. In it, I take visibility as something the North American and Brazilian missionaries mobilise, produce and withhold, and analyse how their modus operandi spans the full spectrum: hypervisible where it states its aim of “reaching every tribe with the gospel”, and blurred toward the subvisible as it nears Indigenous territories, where its contact logistics dissolve below detection. They strategically mobilise this gradient to hold their actions apart from consequences, so that the harm arrives fragmented, disguised and unattached to their structure. The project attempts to make their shields of power visible and accountable by inverting that logic and reading the spectrum backwards, from their triumphalist narrative to the concealed act, and to trace the violence back to the structure that produces it.
Temporal Enclosure
Ida Lehrmann Lykkegaard
Extractive Futures and Colonial Disinheritance in Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat
In a former colony where no regime of private land ownership was ever imposed, how do you render visible the legacy and continuity of colonial land dispossession? At the southern tip of Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat, a milder climate has long sustained small-scale agriculture – and, as the world heats, increasingly enables large-scale mining. As international companies claim the land through mineral exploration licences, an extractive future threatens the ecosystems local communities depend on. The seemingly only protective shield is Kujataa, a UNESCO cultural landscape that preserves the remnants of the first Europeans to settle in “the New World” in 985, disinheriting 4500 years of Indigenous presence. The Norse settlement was brief but seeded the imperial imaginary that led Denmark to recolonise Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat in 1721.
Where mining companies project an extractive future onto the land, Kujataa seeks to preserve its agrarian settler-colonial past. This project traces the tension and trajectories of these regimes of demarcation, arguing that enclosing the land’s pasts and futures is what secures spatial control in the present. Both, by slow and systemic means, re-enact the dispossession and displacement that led Indigenous communities to take up farming generations ago.
Where mining companies project an extractive future onto the land, Kujataa seeks to preserve its agrarian settler-colonial past. This project traces the tension and trajectories of these regimes of demarcation, arguing that enclosing the land’s pasts and futures is what secures spatial control in the present. Both, by slow and systemic means, re-enact the dispossession and displacement that led Indigenous communities to take up farming generations ago.
Remembering the Space
Vania Montgomery
Urban Traces of Five Houses of Laughter in Santiago Chile
In a former colony where no regime of private land ownership was ever imposed, how do you render visible the legacy and continuity of colonial land dispossession? At the southern tip of Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat, a milder climate has long sustained small-scale agriculture – and, as the world heats, increasingly enables large-scale mining. As international companies claim the land through mineral exploration licences, an extractive future threatens the ecosystems local communities depend on. The seemingly only protective shield is Kujataa, a UNESCO cultural landscape that preserves the remnants of the first Europeans to settle in “the New World” in 985, disinheriting 4500 years of Indigenous presence. The Norse settlement was brief but seeded the imperial imaginary that led Denmark to recolonise Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat in 1721.
Where mining companies project an extractive future onto the land, Kujataa seeks to preserve its agrarian settler-colonial past. This project traces the tension and trajectories of these regimes of demarcation, arguing that enclosing the land’s pasts and futures is what secures spatial control in the present. Both, by slow and systemic means, re-enact the dispossession and displacement that led Indigenous communities to take up farming generations ago.
In a former colony where no regime of private land ownership was ever imposed, how do you render visible the legacy and continuity of colonial land dispossession? At the southern tip of Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat, a milder climate has long sustained small-scale agriculture – and, as the world heats, increasingly enables large-scale mining. As international companies claim the land through mineral exploration licences, an extractive future threatens the ecosystems local communities depend on. The seemingly only protective shield is Kujataa, a UNESCO cultural landscape that preserves the remnants of the first Europeans to settle in “the New World” in 985, disinheriting 4500 years of Indigenous presence. The Norse settlement was brief but seeded the imperial imaginary that led Denmark to recolonise Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat in 1721.
Where mining companies project an extractive future onto the land, Kujataa seeks to preserve its agrarian settler-colonial past. This project traces the tension and trajectories of these regimes of demarcation, arguing that enclosing the land’s pasts and futures is what secures spatial control in the present. Both, by slow and systemic means, re-enact the dispossession and displacement that led Indigenous communities to take up farming generations ago.
When Moving Turns into Being Moved and Re-moved
Marta Pagliaccia
Imagine a lawyer with five days to appeal to the Court of Cassation against a person’s detention in an Italian Immigration Removal Centre (CPR). They go to the Centre to have their client sign a power of attorney, only to find that the client is no longer there. The staff are not authorised to say where. To find out, the lawyer must file a formal request to the police and wait: the answer, if it comes, may be that the person has been deported, moved to prison, or transferred to another CPR, hundreds of kilometres away. By then the appeal deadline may have passed, and with it the right to a defence. Transfers between CPRs are routine; they require no written reasons, no judicial oversight and no notice to the lawyer, and are left to police discretion. This research investigates the movements the CPR system imposes on the bodies it detains, and how transfers feed the extraction of time that characterises CPRs, like all prison systems. It starts from the analysis of the regulatory vacuum surrounding transfers, and examines several case studies gathered from mediated testimonies and data obtained through FOI requests. An interactive platform, the “RE-MOVED OBSERVATORY”, is the tool through which cases are archived, mapped and queried, using a spatio-temporal method that translates them into graphic paths. It aims to become a shared resource to support the work of the activists and NGOs of the Rete Mai Più Lager – No CPR network towards the permanent closure of these Centres.
The Enclosure of the Sea
Jan Peuker
The sea has been enclosed by legal limits, such as fishing, passage and mooring rights; water has changed shape through reclamation, shipping fairways and sedimentation. This project asks how to re-represent a world now gone? Counter-mapping is the standard answer, today within reach of any community with internet access. But for the Orang Laut, the sea people of Southeast Asia's Johor-Riau archipelago, there is no easy anchor in a map. No overlay can fathom the loss of depth, because any map fixes the sea into its own regime. Only lore can carry what has been lost, but with its world disappearing it becomes unnameable.
The project “the enclosure of the sea” builds tools for communities to state and record this loss on their own terms. Without mediation, yet translatable to anyone who needs to listen. 3D-printed models and laser-templates for cardboard are based on colonial sea charts (e.g. an 1899 admiralty survey of Singapore) that still featured named islands, reefs and sandbanks before reclamation. An AR web app helps situate the archive without legibility within the model itself.
The project “the enclosure of the sea” builds tools for communities to state and record this loss on their own terms. Without mediation, yet translatable to anyone who needs to listen. 3D-printed models and laser-templates for cardboard are based on colonial sea charts (e.g. an 1899 admiralty survey of Singapore) that still featured named islands, reefs and sandbanks before reclamation. An AR web app helps situate the archive without legibility within the model itself.
Managed Time
Hana Soule
In Mott Haven, in the South Bronx, New York City is building one of four borough-based jails to replace those on Rikers Island. The same 2019 approvals that sited the jail rezoned a strip of its block for affordable housing. Across the street, family houses have been zoned for manufacturing since 1961: they can be repaired but not rebuilt as homes.From that street, the research follows how the City manages time: how long its permits, orders and programmes run, and how long people wait. After-hours work permits for the jail site are renewed again and again. Orders remove residents from unsafe buildings and schedule no date for return. Housing preservation programmes begin and record no completion. Read across City datasets, these records trace a carceral–housing nexus: land passing between police, correction, shelter and housing agencies through routine City approvals.The research takes the form of a website that sets these records beside fieldwork recordings and interviews, and marks what the City’s record leaves out. Developed in dialogue with local organisers, the research treats anti-displacement work as anti-carceral work.
An Incomplete Cartography of "Banking"
Sarolta Szatmari
Developed in collaboration with Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and their Housing Observatory. Thank you to Antoine Paccoud for all the support, as well as to Markus Miessen and the team at Cultures of Assembly (COA), University of Luxembourg.
Access the Platform here
PDF of Dissertation
Mapping the opaque structures of speculative/strategic land banking in Luxembourg
This project investigates and narrates the phenomenon of speculative/strategic land banking in Luxembourg – the practice of holding land over long periods of time, deliberately withholding it from the market in anticipation of rising values. In short: hoarding land. It traces the story of Luxembourg’s land and its banks – two things that have shaped the country’s past, defined its present, and will likely determine its future, and which, the longer you look at them, seem increasingly to be losing their traditional definitions, blurring instead into one another. This research project attempts to understand this blurring, and what it leaves behind in the land itself. While the surface of the land may appear unchanged for years or even decades, legal, financial, administrative, and ecological processes continue to unfold underneath it. By tracing and mapping these opaque structures, it asks who controls time in relation to land, and what kinds of power emerge through strategies that treat land as a long-term storage device for value – contributing, in Luxembourg, to an artificial land scarcity and one of the most extreme housing crises in Europe.
This project investigates and narrates the phenomenon of speculative/strategic land banking in Luxembourg – the practice of holding land over long periods of time, deliberately withholding it from the market in anticipation of rising values. In short: hoarding land. It traces the story of Luxembourg’s land and its banks – two things that have shaped the country’s past, defined its present, and will likely determine its future, and which, the longer you look at them, seem increasingly to be losing their traditional definitions, blurring instead into one another. This research project attempts to understand this blurring, and what it leaves behind in the land itself. While the surface of the land may appear unchanged for years or even decades, legal, financial, administrative, and ecological processes continue to unfold underneath it. By tracing and mapping these opaque structures, it asks who controls time in relation to land, and what kinds of power emerge through strategies that treat land as a long-term storage device for value – contributing, in Luxembourg, to an artificial land scarcity and one of the most extreme housing crises in Europe.
Climate without Weather
Lene Tassin
The research culminated in the making of a film titled “Still Life” (40 mins)., 2026.
Thank you to Air Alliance Houston, the Climate Justice Museum, Nameless Sound Houston, Dr. Stephen Fox at Rice University, and all those who helped in the fieldwork and research.
PDF of Dissertation
Once a tool for industrial productivity and later engineered for thermal comfort, air conditioning is now debated as a human right. Reflective of this political climate, this research focuses on Houston, Texas: the birthplace of American imperialism’s conquest of space and of weather. Locals often say that what made the city of Houston was the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the discovery of oil, and the invention of air conditioning. These three foundational pillars – a weather event, the petrochemical industry, and a thermodynamic machine – are all entangled through their relationship with air. Conditioned air, in turn, becomes a spatial field that organizes, segregates, sustains or kills. Pushed to the background of our attention, the air conditioner's hum signals to its infrastructural permanence – disrupted only by the crises in which it is implicated: the power outage and the storm. From the scale of the machine to the scale of the skies, this project uncovers a politically charged atmosphere where even the shape of the clouds fail to escape climatic control. However, through a collection of legal, sonic, and visual materials, the research renders the “cloud’s” shape legible, proposing that the sky becomes evidence itself, mapping a meteorological matrix of political accountability.
The Temporal Politics of Pushbacks
Viktorija Vasaityte
Since 2021, the Lithuanian State Border Guard Service (VSAT) has published edited surveillance footage of encounters with people attempting to cross the border from Belarus. The footage often follows a recognisable sequence: detection, interception and pushback. The recordings emerged during a period of emergency measures introduced by Lithuania in response to what the government described as the “instrumentalisation” of migration by Belarus.The camera appears to document the encounter as evidence of border control, but the recording also has a temporal boundary: it begins at a particular moment, follows the operation, and ends. Rather than treating the footage as a complete record of the border encounter, this project takes the videos as a starting point and follows what lies beyond their frames and temporal boundaries. By tracing these gaps and absences, it investigates the legal, spatial and technological infrastructures that shape and enable pushbacks, asking what becomes visible when the institutional version of the event ends.