Claudia Lehmann
Supervisor
Abstract
Transversal Thresholds
Water, Knowledge and Resistance in Eastern Crete
In villages surrounding Sitia, Eastern Crete, communities are challenging “green energy” developments through legal proceedings, defending the karstic water system threatened by surface infrastructures. Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) have treated each layer of the water system - atmosphere, surface and subsurface - as separate technical domains, obscuring their interconnectedness. The research examines "transversal thresholds," the intersections where hydrogeological and cultural relations span these fragmented layers. Transversal thresholds cut across horizontal divisions of governance, enabling hydrological currents to seep, converge, and generate knowledge expanding between the counterpoints of "legitimate" epistemologies. Rainwater infiltrates surface karst, travelling through caves, rivers, and aquifers, re-emerging at springs kilometres away. Communities have developed a hydrogeological vernacular of neráides, water nymph tales, spatialising the relation between surface and subsurface. This intergenerational knowledge has supported litigation against wind energy developments damaging recharge zones. In Sitia, turbines are proposed on porous limestone that channels water into aquifers, yet EIAs treat this rock as inert foundation rather than active hydrological medium. This is epistemological violence: systematic denial that integrated, relational knowledge has legitimacy in governance. Drawing on hydrofeminist scholarship, which positions water as fundamentally relational rather than bounded within discrete technical domains, this practice-led research develops a methodology responding directly to community requests. Working at springs, boreholes, and turbines, collaborative material investigation is conducted through field etching, photochemical alchemy, and wild clay modelling, resisting the demand for total legibility: asking what should remain under the surface, rather than exposed to further extraction. Reading groups convene residents, land workers, technical experts, and legal advocates to annotate documents across transversal thresholds, building a hydrofeminist archive that carries this knowledge toward litigation with the same care it takes to protect it. Together, these material and archival investigations generate artefacts that render community knowledge legible within, and politically actionable against, governance frameworks that systematically exclude it.
Bio
Claudia Lehmann is an artist, spatial practitioner, and researcher tracing currents from the high atmosphere to deep subsurface. Her practice examines infrastructures that enclose and extract from hydro-geo-cultural landscapes, utilising fieldwork and embodied methodologies that draw out multiple, sometimes conflicting ways of knowing place: oral histories, data, myth, and embodied memory. She grew up in Penwith, Cornwall, amidst mining histories, neolithic structures, and folkloric remnants, attuning her to entanglements of more-than-human forces. Water - its stories, infrastructures, and ecologies - form a central current through her practice. Recent research includes non-mono-soon, co-developing ecological toolkits with South Indian communities restoring wetlands disrupted by colonial monocultures and changing climatic rhythms (CLIMAVORE x Jameel Emerging Practice Food Action Award, 2025); Brackish Registers, investigating aquifer salinisation and degredation of cultural heritage through salt-water copper etching and film souping (CYENS, Cyprus, 2025); Confluences, mapping karstic landscapes threatened by energy developments in Eastern Crete (2024-2025); and metallophyte bal maiden, reclaiming post-industrial mining sites through mineral archives, labour, and experimental photography (2024-2025). She draws on hydrofeminist and decolonial frameworks to make visible the displacements, inheritances, and solidarities flowing through these sites, producing artefacts communities can mobilise in political and legal struggle. Claudia collaborates with communities, activists, and technical experts, prioritising reciprocity and ongoing engagement. She holds an MA in Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts.
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Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
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ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme