Research
2024
Capital and Cartography investigates cartography’s crucial role in capitalism's rise, arguing that maps encode global spatial inequality into visual form.
The project advances three case studies that critically engage with cartographic representation, and identifies two contrasting approaches to space and capital – one abstract and global, the other focused on local, lived experience. I assert the year 1492 as a pivotal moment for both Western capitalism and colonial modernity, introducing the term "Eurovision" – a Eurocentric way of seeing nature as quantifiable and commodifiable – and applying it to materials from the relaciones geográficas archive. I then focus on the spatial turn of the 1970s, analyzing works by artists like Cildo Meireles, Edward Burtysnky, and George Osodi. My third and final case explores how big data and surveillance technology have further obscured capitalism's oppressive mechanisms, using Laura Poitras' 2016 "Astronoise" exhibition at the Whitney as a primary example.
Taken together, the case studies reveal how innovations in form can disrupt hegemonic visual narratives, proving that capitalism’s tendency to obscure the sphere of production from view is in essence a problem of representation.
Winner of the Eugene H. Byrne Prize for Superior Work in History
IMAGE COMPARISONS
Comp 1 – Laura Poitras, close-up of ANARCHIST: Straightened Doppler Track from a Satellite (Intercepted August 4, 2009), 2016 // Barnett Newman, Onement VI, 1953
Comp 2 – Laura Poitras, close-up of ANARCHIST: Time Raster Display from Orbcomm Satellite
(Intercepted May 28, 2009), 2016 // Anni Albers, close-up of Design for Smyrna Rug, 1925