Minor Materialisms:
Toward a Theory of Minor Spatial Practice
This
project puts forward an outline theory of minor spatial practice. It
combines art historical and research-creation methods in three parts.
The first lays the theoretical foundation for minor spatial practice.
It proposes a connection between Henri Lefevbvre’s theorization of
the social production of space and Deleuze and Guattari’s
description of minor literature. The pairing results in a framework
for minor spatial practice.
The second and third parts are case
studies. In the second part, I discuss Omaskêko Ininiwak artist
Duane Linklater’s public artwork, Monsters
for Beauty, Permanence and Individuality (2017), located in the Don River Valley in Toronto, Canada. I compare
the sculpture to the Evergreen Brick Works, a nearby architecture and
land reclamation project. The juxtaposition suggests an inflection
between expressions of minor and major spatial practice.
The third
part focuses on a body of artwork I produced during an artist
residency in Barreiro, Portugal. The residency takes place on a
mixed-used industrial park with ties to Barreiro’s
historical industrialization and urbanization. I use architectural
drawings and other techniques associated with producing scientific
representations of space to analyze the material conditions of the
site. The resulting drawings, sculpture, and photographs are posed as
speculative treatments of these authoritative techniques, and as
revealing a possibility for a minor spatial practice to emerge from
the ruins of a majoritarian mode of production.
I conclude by
specifying the practical and theoretical intention motivating the
definition of minor spatial practice.
2026
Minor spatial practice is meant to stress the having-been-madeness of space, to uncouple space from nature, and to make evident the inertial tendencies in the mode of production to reproduce the ordering of the terms and positions prefigured in the system of meaning and value expressed as the ideo-environmental conditions of everyday life. In the minor mode, the structural graph of ideology dissolves, the affective constraints delimiting the terms, holding their positions, and choreographing the enactment of their relations become unformed material of expression for a performance of space charged with political immediacy and collective value. What takes shape in the in minoritarian performances of space is a sociality of life-living without representation. What kind of difference emerges from a practice of living without representation? What kind of space is produced by a practice of living without representation? These are speculative questions about how the environmental, social, and affective patterns enforced as systemic ideals through the instrumentalization of space can be treated as moments in a process of becoming and as the conditions of possibility for more than the iterative differences of structural reproduction. The differences that emerge in space’s becoming-minor are the formless diversity of a complex and social materialism, a commonplace materialism in which the sites engrained as axiomatic by the forces of systemic reproduction are opened to the possibilities of variation felt in the constraints of their determination.