MATERIAL WITNESS
This research and my related MIT Press book and documentary film introduces a new operative concept—material witness—an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events as well as exposing the practices and procedures that enable such matter to bear witness.
Material witnesses are non-human entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history. Engaging, at the same time, with the institutional logics that structure their difference in order to expand acts of witnessing to more-than-human realms.
As a conceptual imperative and practical project my aim is ultimately to relink the material world and its affordances with the space of the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.
The Image of War, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2017-18)
Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, MACBA, Barcelona & MUAC, Mexico City (2017)
Forensis, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, (March 2014)
Landscape as Material Witness BEK workshop / Odda & Bondhus Glacier trek, Bergen (21-25 February 2022)
Witness Statements and Technologies of Memory, The Mosiac Rooms (2021)
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (3 February 2018)
Material witnesses are non-human entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history. Engaging, at the same time, with the institutional logics that structure their difference in order to expand acts of witnessing to more-than-human realms.
As a conceptual imperative and practical project my aim is ultimately to relink the material world and its affordances with the space of the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.
EXHIBITIONS
The Image of War, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm (2017-18)
Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, MACBA, Barcelona & MUAC, Mexico City (2017)
Forensis, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, (March 2014)
TALKS & WORKSHOPS
Landscape as Material Witness BEK workshop / Odda & Bondhus Glacier trek, Bergen (21-25 February 2022)
Witness Statements and Technologies of Memory, The Mosiac Rooms (2021)
Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (3 February 2018)
Aspects of this research was conducted with the funding support of Forensic Architecture.
RESEARCH