The interactions betweenhumans and the natural environment have contributed to building currentsocieties but have also led to unsettling scenarios. This research iscontextualised in the Mar Menor lagoon and its surroundings, in southeastSpain. The landscape there has deteriorated due to various industrialactivities. The initial focus is on mining — the lagoon's first source ofpollution and currently inactive site — to explore the roots of the localhuman-nature relationship. Conceptually, the research is founded on theintersection of three areas. First, it is framed within a posthumanistphilosophy that questions the dualism of nature-culture and decentres the humanbeing. Second, with a more-than-human approach, design is employed as a noveldiscipline in the local context. Third, the notion of matter is used as atheoretical and practical link between posthumanism and design. This researchsheds light on the value and limitations of posthumanism concerning design. Italso aims to ignite new narratives around materials in the Mar Menorenvironment.

I will be presenting aliterature review exploring posthumanist philosophy and design, with matter asthe connection between the two. This review integrates key theories andexamples from practitioners, ultimately uncovering unexplored approaches withindesign research and setting the foundation for the next phases of my PhD. Morespecifically, the literature review should lead to a practice phase that makesconcrete and tangible the idea of using matter with a more-than-humanperspective.

Isabel Alonso is amultidisciplinary freelance designer and PhD candidate funded by LAHP. Sheapproaches design as a collaborative, research-driven, and experimentalpractice. Her PhD investigates how design, informed by a posthumanistperspective, can challenge cultural narratives about materials in the contextof the Mar Menor lagoon in Spain.

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This paper presents a bookwork in progress, In the Garden ThereAre Images of You, developed as part of an investigation into the agency of publishing practices in collective struggles over enduring legacies of violence. The project focuses on the case of the Spanish state, where the afterlives of the military dictatorship (1939–1975) have taken an unprecedented role in shaping contemporary political subjectivities. At the turn of the 21st century, calls to unearth this troubled past became literal in an ongoing wave of heavily mediatised exhumations. These excavations, codified by the idioms of memory and forensics, have effectively turned mass graves into public spaces of enunciation. However, exhumations have also sparked significant controversies regarding the individualisation of the disappeared, the invisibilisation of key actors and dimensions of the conflict, or the isolation of fascism and a narrow range of its material traces from the broader continuum of imperial violence.Crucially, either as psychoanalytically inflected archaeologies of memory or as counter-forensic tools of evidence production, these exhumations have also fuelled resolution-oriented narratives and aesthetic registers that render the past as a discrete historical event, streamlining its complex modes of existence and the ways it overdetermines the shape of the present.

This project participates in the creation of new public spaces of appearance for bodies and imaginations that return from the dead. It does so by registering their elusive consistencies and activating the affective textures that evade the truth-production methods of memorial and forensic paradigms. Departing from these approaches and their epistemic privileging of depth, the project develops a situated inquiry into surfaces: pages and walls, images and plants, dust and films, screens and skins. In particular, it mobilises publishing as a surface-oriented spatial practice concerned not only with making things public but also with making the public itself. In this light, publishing becomes a future-oriented endeavour of summoning both the spectres of a lingering past and the public willing to recognise these spectres as part of their own kin.

Drawing from an ongoing series of iterative publishing exercises, this paper focuses on an exploratory bookwork produced during fieldwork in Almería, in the arid southeast of theIberian Peninsula. A succession of surfaces on the edge of collapse, Almería hosts the world’s largest concentration of greenhouses amidst a unique sequence of landscape formations captured in hundreds of cinematic fictions. Accounts of this site often portray it as either a blooming desert devoid of history or the culmination of an orderly historical sequence of extractive fevers and territorial transformations. Yet the dismal legacies of colonial enterprises, radioactive contaminations, and fascist massacres complicate these accounts, infiltrating Almería’s surfaces in ways that excavations alone cannot explain.Circling these spectral infiltrations, and taking its title from a verse by12th-century Andalusian poet Abū Jaʻfar Ibn Saʻid, In the Garden There Are Images of You calls forth an ecology of architectures, mediation technologies, seeds, crops, and other bodies that continue to move into and out of the Earth.

In 1911, the ‘Great Porcupine Forest Fire’, which burnt half a million acres of Ontario forest, killing upwards of 70 people, made international headlines. It was described by the media at the time as “the worst disaster in Ontario history”. The few visual records which exist of this event largely concern photographs of the fire’s aftermath and the town’s recovery effort. It has since been identified that the iconic image of the blaze itself, the one reproduced in the national press which galvanised support for financial relief, was faked. Its photographer, Henry Peters, had produced a composite image of the town’s high street with an image of clouds emulating the appearance of black smoke.

This paper will focus on interpreting this forged image in relation to two paradigms that have continuously surrounded the visual representation of wildfire. One, of the technical and practical challenges of photographing ephemera is that it is bright, hot and fast-moving fast moving, resulting in fire’s reproduction often bearing little resemblance to reality. Two, that environmental narratives are inaugurated through the images we produce and the knowledge or emotion the general public attaches to them (Pyne, 2018).

The events in ‘Porcupine’; a gold rush community which emerged when North American forested areas were rapidly transformed into various forms of capital, were mediated through photographs; postcards and newspaper reports. Analysis of this media will demonstrate how wildfire images become discursive and socio-political events. By linking this material to contemporary examples and other examples of compromised and fabricated representations of fire, this paper will reflect on ongoing debates surrounding how we communicate the significance of larger, more frequent fires as they increasingly appear in built-up areas and the technical and aesthetic boundaries of fire’s representation. The content of this paper presentations its within the wider thesis focussing on wildfire’s increasingly suburban character, one which today has transformed the presence of flame through disciplines not limited to: forest management; building regulations; urban planning; disaster management and insurance underwriting into various forms of suppression. Struggling for viability in relentless cycles of burn and rebuild, these disciplines have been increasingly reliant on the production of photographic evidence to transform the thresholds of environmental and economic risk into a higher cultural tolerance for living in zones that  have a tendency to burn. In this visual ecology, conflicts between the aesthetic registers of different forms of image production fail to sufficiently align with any consistent severity metric, disrupting metric of severity and therefore disrupt the potential for a cohesive contemporary environmental narrative to be formed.

This research thesis has three main themes: flight and militarism,;flight from a feminist perspective,;andflight reimagined through the hapticity of textiles. How can were-imagine flight away from the military-industrial complex, and why is itimportant to do so? This investigation is based on studying my familyarchive and researchingthe study of my familyarchive and research into the family members who occupiedimportant positions in early Soviet aviation. In this context, I amfocusing on the role of women in enabling and endorsing men’s explorations of I amfocusing on the role of the women in enabling and endorsing the men’sexplorations into aviation. My research analysesprovidesan analysis of the connection between private and publicconceptualisations of flight, flight as metaphor, and the relationship betweenthe individual and the state within relation tothe development of the technologies of actual flight.

Since the development offlight technologies early in the 20th century, flight andflying havehas capturedthe collective imagination, yet patriarchy has firmly harnessed their potentialtheiritspotential has been firmly harnessed by patriarchy.  This thesis analyses the contemporaryperspectives on flight through the feminist thinking of Silvia Federici, Sadie Plant, Rosie Braidotti, and LaboriaCuboniks. By problematising the geopoliticsgeo-politicsof flight within relation topersonal histories and feminist thought, this research develops new artisticand theoretical visions of flight. These reimaginings of flight aim to offertransformative iterations for our future with flight technologies that setsetsaside any reliance on the male-dominatedmale dominatedtechno-industrial capitalist militarism that continues to contribute toecological collapse, climate catastrophe, and global refugee and migrantcrisis.

In this paper,I will explore what flight represents from a feminist perspective – by defining flying, lifting off, as well asfleeing, escaping – whilst trying to re-imagine what a subjectivelyemancipatory, politically deterritorialised mode of flight might look like, whenflight is reimagined and reclaimed through haptic technologies, andcollaborative and collective feminist practices of textiles and fibre-based artprojects. I argue that knowledgethere is knowledge thatcan be enhanced through resistance to the cartesian,patriarchal form of vision: the knowledge that is is intensifiedthrough haptic viewing and haptic making. Hapticity is a non-patriarchal domain; it, itsignifies the close-up, the nomadic, the emergent, and thecollective forms of knowledge. Following on from Federici via Deleuze andGuattari, and drawing from collective feministpractices, I am developing haptic reimaginings of flight technologies thatsuggest resisting the dominant techno-capitalist notions of flight. My argumentsuggests that dreamworlds of flight could be channelled – through thesoftening, haptic qualities of thinking through hand-making – into empoweringwomen to reimagine their role concerningin relation totechnologies, where instead of the automation of labour, visions of a posthumanfeminist futurea posthuman feminist futures can bebuilt around eco-communality and post-technological solidarity.

Varvara Keidan Shavrova is a visual artist and researcher. She received an MFA inFine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London, and has been awarded AHRC LAHPStudentship for her practice-based PhD at the RCA. She received the LAHPplacement award at the Science Museum in London. She has exhibitedinternationally, including at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2014),Photomuseum Ireland (2012), Espacio Cultural El Tanque Tenerife (2011), BeijingArt Museum of Imperial City (2008), Imperial War Museum Duxford (2019), DilstonGrove Southwark Park Galleries (2022), Beaconsfield Contemporary Art (2023,2024). She curated 'The Sea is the Limit' at the York Museums (2018) and at theVirginia Commonwealth University Gallery in Doha, Qatar (2019). She co-curated'Beijing Map Games: Dynamics of Change' at Today Art Museum Beijing, BirminghamMuseums & Art Gallery UK, cAoS Centre for Contemporary Art, Italy(2008-2009). Keidan Shavrova has contributed articles, essays, and exhibitionreviews to international publications, including Visual Artists Ireland,Virginia Commonwealth University Arts Qatar magazine, and Yale Publications

My practice-led research integrates embodied, auto-ethnographic research methods within a hybrid fine art practice grounded in performance and materiality. I draw from my own lived experience to harness the power of the brown female body as a living archive to analyse what I term‘(un)belonging’, informed by the insights of Brah (1996), Yuval-Davis (2006)and Kokoli and Sliwinska (2021). I am subject and medium, with my body and performative actions functioning as a repository for personal and collective narratives of (un)belonging to critically engage with the representation ofSouth Asian women in Britain and their histories. Specifically, I examine textile colonial legacies tied to labour exploitation and resource commodification under British rule, mapping their influence on contemporary female diasporic identities through my family’s matrilineal journey. My practice gives form to these histories through durational live performances and moving image works. 

This paper, situated within the broader scope of this project, examines how power, visibility, and the dominant gaze operate across contemporary art spaces, including galleries, archives, and on-screen, and how these dynamics shape the formation of subjectivity among British South Asian women artists. Through the iconic 1972 Urdu-language film Pakeezah, part of the courtesan genre in classical South Asian cinema, I investigate the historical and cultural frameworks underpinning ongoing struggles over visibility and representation in contested spaces. I use Pakeezah as an interpretive lens to trace a historical continuity in how South Asian women’s bodies, behaviours, and identities are framed and constrained by patriarchal and colonial narratives while also revealing enduring strategies of agency and resistance. This approach situates the Muslim courtesan figure as a critical reference point for understanding how these legacies continue to impact the experiences of British South Asian women artists navigating intersecting forces of race, gender, and class in the contemporary art sphere.

Central to this analysis is the notion of liminality, where Black and brown women are positioned within a spectrum of hypervisibility and erasure. Expanding on bell hooks’ concept of the ‘oppositional gaze’ and Tina Campt’s theorisation of the ‘Black gaze’, I situate the courtesan figure as a prism through which the politics of space and identity can be reimagined in both historical and current contexts. This framework offers a new, alternative perspective into how visibility is mediated by institutional and cultural constructs that dictate where, how, and under what terms women from marginalised communities, particularly those from theGlobal Majority, can exist and express themselves.

By embedding these discussions within a performative fine art practice, this research critiques and actively intervenes in systems of power. Through embodied performance, it destabilises and deconstructs dominant norms, using the body as a tool for intervention. This methodology allows for an intimate engagement with the stakes of visibility and representation, creating a powerful dialogue between personal history and broader cultural discourses on race, identity and representation. 

Actions Possibilities Mapping Tool for Wool Ecosystems (Chiara Tommencioni Pisapia)

The Table of Unlearnings (Eleonora Antoniadou)

Co-Creating Contemporary Choreographic Environments with Generative AI (Julia Wolf & Dr Dario Srbic)

Since its excavation, the alluring frescoes of Pompeii depicting pleasurable bodies, buildings and mythologies have taken on their own language as objects of desire. The ashen preservation of the city’s history has inspired both real and fantastical projections onto its mysterious architectures since the late 1700s. Positioning myself between these two perceptions, the research reconsiders the biases, fabulations and reinterpretations of these artefacts within today’s digital ruins of the 21st century.

The first chapter considers the patriarchal perspectives that have donned the sites of Pompeii to this day, and questions how images and reinterpretations have changed over time through feminist perspectives. The chapter will examine in detail the narratives written of one of the most heralding and acclaimed sites in Ancient Pompeii, The Villa of Mysteries. Since the frescos’ discovery in 1909, the depicted women of Room 5 in the Villa have been the objects of fascination and wild speculations concerning their religion, relationships, and their sexual and love lives. The project responds to gendered assumptions and patriarchal lenses that have shaped the interpretation of these images since its excavation from archaeological writings, psychoanalysis and surrealist art, towards second-wave feminist responses and queer art movements inspired by the work. The chapter will look specifically at two artistic renditions of the Villa’s famous frieze, Maria Borosso’s watercolour rendition of the scene made within the first few years of the villa’s excavation, and David Cannon Dashiell’s Queer Mysteries, a translated story of the villa through the queer lens of the late 1990s.

Finally, the theme of forgeries will be considered in the theoretical approach to compare the image of the artefact, its expanded narrative and writings on the feminine between historical and contemporary digital practice. Archaeological histories of Rosemary Joyce, James Mellaart, Margarete Bieber, Sigmund Freud and more recent artists including Ed Atkins will be investigated.

My practice-based research excavates the debris of the Birmingham Central Library out of and through the internet, adopting an essayistic approach that combines images, objects, text and performance alongside archaeological and archival methods to reimagine the site as a regenerative pirate spaceship and to reclaim Brutalist architecture as an alien other (or Xeno).

The ongoing physical and ideological destruction of Britain’s Brutalist legacy erases any trace of the utopian ambitions imbued within the fabric of such buildings. In an era increasingly defined by post-progressive politics and ideological austerity, I argue that a willingness to speculate on radical alternatives to the way we preserveBrutalism is needed now more than ever if we are to resist what the collective Laboria Cuboniks (2015) refers to as “these puritanical politics of shame—which fetishise oppression as if it were a blessing”. Historical art practices typically regard Brutalism as an architectural vernacular; however, this approach fails to acknowledge that Brutalism was originally conceived of as a methodology (Highmore, 2017). As a result, there is a gap in knowledge of how contemporary documentary practices – applied as a performative action – can engage with sites such as the Birmingham Central Library, not as relics of the past but as speculative devices for the future.

For this paper, I will present work made while in residence at the New Art Gallery Walsall, where a digital concrete fragment was coded to respond to the stock market value of oil on the futures market. I use this example to draw together the temporal and spatial dislocation to reveal a reality that looks beyond the binary of something simply existing or not existing to speculate on - to quote MarkFisher quoting Herbert Marcuse at the beginning of Acid Communism - “the spectre of a world that could be free.” (2018)

By merging machine learning analysis with architectural digital documentation, this PhD research explores applying a new pedagogical approach to machine-human collaboration theorised here as ‘syntagogy’- a term coined to describe this novel framework. Reflecting Vitruvian ideals of multidisciplinary knowledge, the approach examines how architects must now learn to teach machines, curating and compressing data that carries spatial meaning.

Critical theorist Luciana Parisi points out that all modern algorithms inherently depend on data, whether they compute or produce it. How can we, as architects, feed into this process of automatic prehension? The project methodology is driven by the scarcity of prior research on data formats within the architectural heritage. Data acquisition, a labour-intensive process, requires curating point cloud sets for their compatibility with existing machine vision systems.  This research argues that the syntagogical inquest should look at historical examples of well-established compression methods -architectural notation. With its heritage dating back to Alberti and theRenaissance, a review of this tradition, as outlined by Mario Carpo, revealed a rich parallel between architectural notation and today’s digital formats, each striving to find equilibrium between compression and detail.

This paper foregrounds an experimental project where machine learning is applied to point cloud analysis of Christ Church Spitalfields in London and Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Birmingham, underscoring both the potential and limitations of digital documentation in conveying architectural experience and heritage buildings through ‘the eye of the algorithm’. Building on the work of data philosophers like Matteo Pasquinelli, Luciana Parisi and Antoinette Rovroy, the project demonstrates how in this process of teaching machines, architects must navigate this uncanny digital landscape, integrating human intuition with machine capabilities.

The project’s practice delves into point cloud acquisition and processing, which proved aesthetically evocative and technically challenging. The unsupervised clustering via K-Means returned results that, upon inspection, deviate from the established categorisation of architectural elements such as columns and walls andforeground the dynamic expression of horizontal and vertical surfaces of the entire building. These digital models' sparse, abstract quality—especially inthe Baroque details of Christ Church Spitalfields—reveals a poetic ‘uncanny’ within architectural data, suggesting that documentation shapes perception.

The experiments reveal that point clouds offer machine-compatible insights into spatial data while creating new aesthetic dimensions. By adapting traditional notation to accommodate non-conscious learners, architectural education can evolve to guide machine-driven documentation, preserving architectural integrity and digital space's emerging poetics. This proposal envisions a machine pedagogy within architectural education, where data is a tool for spatial accuracy and exploring territories of new, collaborative aesthetics that foreground the machine’s creative agency. 

Christina Sharpe in her essay The Weather from her 2016 book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, she describes Dionne Brand’s 2001 book A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging as a “Ruttier” that “does not contain conventional navigational instructions to country and safe landing” (Sharpe 2016:107).  She continues “Ruttier,” then, as a way-making tool and a refusal of nation, country, citizenship; it is a barometer, a reading of and a response to those atmospheric pressures and the predictably unpredictable changes in climates that, nonetheless, remain antiblack. In this keynote, Barby will explore what it means to find your way through an academic journey while attempting to navigate a space that often does not understand, value or see the ways in which the experiences of those deemed “other” have offerings that disrupt, transform, and expand the possibilities of research itself. Drawing on Black feminist and decolonial thought, this talk considers how we might chart our own courses—embracing uncertainty, multiplicity, and collective knowledge as essential tools for way finding in the academy.

Barby Asante is an artist, educator and researcher who works in social practice, film, performance, collective writing, and the creation of transformative spaces for ritual and healing. Grounded in Black feminist and decolonial methodologies, her practice navigates the intersections of art, activism and healing whilst investigating the impacts of slavery and colonialism on contemporary life, focusing on the intricate dynamics of place, memory, and identity. Through collective study, dialogical practices, and countless ways of knowing, Barby invites collaborators and audiences to reflect on histories embedded in our geographies and bodies, facilitating spaces of solidarity and shared breath, creating roots/routes to explore postcolonial migrations, challenging official histories, encouraging dialogues that unearth tensions and contradictions within dominant narratives while reimagining possibilities for liberation and transformation.

Barby completed her PhD in Visual Arts, Performance and Memory Practice at CREAM (Centre for Research in Art and Media), University of Westminster in 2022 and is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.