POLITICS OF MATTER (2026) | DOCTORAL THESIS

Politics of Matter: Constellations of Landscape, Value and Utopianism (2026) examines the making and unmaking of utopian worlds across a composite field site constituted by divergent imaginaries. Unravelling modernity as a temporal engine oscillating between progress and collapse, it seeks to challenge the dualisms that often script future imaginaries and advances an experimental engagement with (un)doing in the interstices of creation and destruction. 

 

Operating through a carnivalesque spacetime of ontological openness and emergence, and drawing conceptual parallels with Walter Benjamin’s constellations in The Arcades Project, the multimodal work undertakes an analytical journey into the (un)doing of ruins and traces in southern Spain. It mobilises mines, plastic, riverbed-ravers and agave death blooms – along others – as ethnographic instances in a constellational puzzle, a toolbox within which readers are invited to continuously reveal, dissolve and recompose; inviting both action and reflection on the multivariate process of making and unmaking.

 

Public link in progress. 

For copies feel free to reach out directly: katya.lachowicz(a)gmail.com