Seeking Com-posthuman Structures

This speculative thesis seeks moments in planning, construction, demolition and design in urban spaces that have the potential to tell other stories. From a direct, embedded perspective it follows nonhuman creativity in excess and exteriors of the human, suggesting a series of fragments, spaces and objects that can emerge from their feral logics.

Scavenging /\nI study the demolition of a neighborhood in Umeå. Here, machines chew down concrete of the central section of the building, revealing void and chewing up a bundle of bent reinforcement, like roots holding clumps of concrete.\nI collect stories about how concrete, reinforcement, and stirred-up layers of soil move through time and space, and speculate on how they will in geological time become new anthropogenic sedimentary stone. Unburnt particles in crushed concrete self-cement in the ground, and I pour concrete into the rearranged earth on a construction site to envision the new sediments' articulation, layered with each demolition. Mapping the temporary spaces lead to the exploration of spatial expressions created as an effect of the planned. These spaces include not only construction and demolition sites, but also the urban areas between planned buildings and empty spaces in the city, as well as digital models. They are Terrain Vagues, places where wild logics are not removed. Using 3D scanning as a tool for interpreting and analyzing these sites, I notice multiple layers and faults in the scannings. Curious of its suggestions, I explore a part of a scanning in detail, allowing the program’s errors to remain as a creative articulation.\nComposting /\nIn each encounter fragments of logics of formation are gathered and I start to assemble objects, artifacts, processes. I seek to make-with openly, allowing the softness or surface of the earth, the plastics reaction to heat, metal's willingness to conform or resist, to guide the process. I use the faulty photogrammetry of an urban void to reinterpret and construct it as a structure, a posthuman generated pavilion that occupies a marginal location in the city, along with two stools of ground-cast concrete and bent reinforcement. \nThese artifacts of excess or waste of modern urbanity expose and play with its desires and troubles, seeking posthuman articulations and temporalities in their architectures.