POLITICS OF MATTER (2026) | DOCTORAL THESIS
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| Above: An illustration of a 'palette' – a shredded cross-section of images contained within each chapter |
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. Bringing together different places, histories, material conditions and imagined futures in southern Spain, the project considers the ways in which landscapes become sites where competing ideas of value and possibility are produced and negotiated. These landscapes are understood not simply as physical environments, but as material and imaginative formations shaped by human intervention, political and economic forces, memory, desire and processes of transformation.
Operating through a carnivalesque spacetime of ontological openness and emergence, and drawing conceptual parallels with Walter Benjamin’s constellations in The Arcades Project, the work develops on the one hand a distinct methodology – moving encounters – taking reference from the performative practices of Simone Forti and contact improvisation, and on the other a specific ethnographic form, in which the material is assembled as a constellational puzzle. Mines, plastic, riverbed-ravers and agave death blooms, among others, form an ethnographic toolbox through which the reader is invited to reveal, dissolve and recompose connections. Rather than rushing towards productive interpretations, the toolbox allows different fragments, temporalities and relations to remain in tension, allocating time for action and reflection on the multivariate processes through which landscapes, values and worlds are continually made and unmade.
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| Above: Examples of photographs taken during fieldwork |
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