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
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.
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?
“For Your Safety”
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
Acces 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.
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.
Climate without Weathere
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.
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.