Conducted through practice-led research, this project explores alternative notions of repair. It asks how aesthetic methods involved in circulations, mediations and material transformations can play a role in planetary repair, recognising that the social and political imaginaries of both built and natural environments are always in processes of co-constitution. How do media codify our relationship to natural environments and how do they, in turn, reshape our relationship to media? How can these relationships be re-oriented to foreground the submerged, reveal the obscured, empower the sidelined, considering links between earth materialities and their multi-scalar mediations? Attentiveness to materiality and scale, alongside time and space, is necessary to understand specific systems of power in situated contexts and to account for the planetary effects of these sets of relations. This project explores how such orientation can bring into being new logics of responsibility, and lead to formulating tools necessary to interrogate ongoing transformations and reveal their acute political stakes.
This project looks at how the geopolitics of elemental media are inherent to ongoing processes of manipulating, engineering and “fixing” climates across geographies. Calls for a planetary repair are being answered by numerous techno-fixes, from fixing carbon by burying it in the ground to fixing the economy by removing it from the realm of politics. These emergency remedies promise to stabilize, preserve and sustain present socio-natures and socio-economic arrangements. While fixes offer quick corrective measures for impending disasters long-in-the-making – what if the problem is with the project of fixity itself? What if in order to repair, we would need to question the universalizing structures and systems that the fixes aim to protect?