Out of the Deep: Legacies of Violence and the Publics to Come
Working across Earth’s surfaces and depths, this project investigates how spatial practices can develop new modes of composing publics and political imaginaries in response to legacies of state and imperial violence. It focuses on theSpanish state, where the afterlives of the dictatorship have played a central role in the construction of political subjectivities since the turn of the century. Codified by the idioms of memory and forensics, an ongoing wave of highly mediatised exhumations has successfully turned mass graves of fascism’s victims into sites of public enunciation. However, this alliance of memoria land forensic paradigms has sparked significant controversies: the individualisation of the disappeared, the invisibilisation of key actors and dimensions of the conflict, and the isolation of the dictatorship – and of a narrow range of its material traces – from the broader continuum of imperial violence. At the same time, whether as psychoanalytically inflected archaeologies of memory or as counter-forensic tools of evidence production, these exhumations have fuelled resolution-driven narratives and aesthetic registers that risk depoliticising and streamlining the complex ways violence endures.
The project develops a situated, practice-based inquiry in the arid southeast of theIberian Peninsula. A succession of surfaces on the edge of collapse, these landscapes host the world’s largest concentration of greenhouses, fields polluted by plastic and plutonium, and a unique sequence of geological formations captured in hundreds of cinematic fictions. Here, the dismal legacies of colonial enterprises, radioactive contaminations, and fascist massacres infiltrate the Earth’s surfaces in ways that the truth-production methods afforded by exhumations alone cannot explain. To spell these spectral contaminations, the thesis interrogates the epistemic privileging of depth across memorial and forensic approaches. On the one hand, it reclaims the notion of depth not as a stabilising substratum to be excavated, but as a delirious topology of interpretive excess. On the other hand, it activates surfaces (pages and plants, images and walls, dust and films, screens and skins) not as shallow sites of representation inherently opposed to depths, but as complex milieus infiltrated by the affects and intensities of a past that overdetermines the present. The project draws on the site’s historical ecology of militant editorial operations, mobilising collective publishing strategies and theory-fiction to plot sites of enunciation across a range of somatic and cultural vectors. Beyond metaphorical and forensic excavations of the past, this investigation underscores the need for practices that summon the spectres infiltrating the Earth’s surfaces – and the publics willing to welcome those spectres as kin.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Funding
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LAHP – AHRC Doctoral Studentship
Personal links
More about Damaso
Experience
Senior Lecturer – Coordinator for Critical and Contextual Studies, The School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University (January 2021 – present)
Associate Lecturer, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art (September 2020 – June 2023)
Lecturer, School of Design, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (January 2021 – September 2022)
Associate Lecturer, The School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University (January 2015 – December 2020)
Editor, Migrant Journal (2017 – 2019)
Awards
London Arts & Humanities Partnership Doctoral Studentship, Arts & Humanities Research Council (2022–2026)
Outstanding Academic Member of Staff, nominated, LMU Student Union Staff Awards (2020)
100 Design Talents of the Year, ICON Design, with Migrant Journal (2019)
Editor of the Year, commended, Stack Awards, with Migrant Journal (2018)
Beazley Designs of the Year, shortlisted, Design Museum, London, with Migrant Journal (2018)
Mobility grant (Visual Arts), Programme for the Internationalisation of Spanish Culture, AC/E – Acción Cultural Española (2016)
Funding
LAHP Doctoral Studentship, Arts & Humanities Research Council (2022–2026)
Exhibitions
Dámaso’s solo and collaborative projects have been presented at the 6th Oslo Architecture Triennale, 57th Venice Art Biennale, 22nd Triennale Milano, 1st Index Biennial of Art and Technology, Design Museum London, Krieg Hasselt, Grassi Museum Leipzig, STUK Leuven, Somerset House, and Tate Modern, among others.
Publications
‘A Digital Genealogy of the Algorithm’, in Dixit Algorizmi: The Garden of Knowledge, edited by Space Caviar and Sheida Ghomaschi. Humboldt Books, 2022, pp. 104–125.
‘Seeing Through Metal’, in Material Review: Metal, edited by Gabriela Acha and Jorge Minano. Material Review, 2021, pp. 65–72.
‘To Complete the Emergence of All the Sky and Earth’, in Migration: The Journey of Objects, edited by Kirsten Algera, Johan Deurell and Ernst van der Hoeven. Röhsska Museet, 2021, pp. 179–187.
‘Dislocations’, Migrant Journal, 6, 2019, pp. 144–155.
‘Tomb for Two’, San Rocco, 14, 2018, pp. 180–189.
‘On Monsoon Assemblages’, with Lindsay Bremner, Migrant Journal, 3, 2017, pp. 90–99.
‘Some Notes on the Migration of Images’, The Absence of Paths, 57 Venice Biennale, 2017.
‘Amphibious Creatures’, Migrant Journal, 2, 2017, pp. 8–21.
‘Nature, Labour, Land: A Forum for Collective Arctic Governance’, with Nabil Ahmed, in After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit, edited by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco et al. Lars Müller Publishers, 2016, pp. 350–360.
Edited Volumes
Migrant Journal 6: Foreign Agents, ed. by Michaela Büsse, Dámaso Randulfe and Justinien Tribillon, co-edited by Christoph Miller and Isabel Seiffert (2019). With contributions by Jesse Connuck, Pol Esteve & Dennis Pohl, Kaspar Hauser, Mirjam Kooiman, Jonathan Liebembuk, Marta Michalowska, Martina Muzi, Nice Katlehong, Benjamin Orlow, Andrew Scheinmam, Reinhard Schmidt & Gabriel Amza, Dima Srouji, Paul Wilson.
Migrant Journal 5: Micro Odysseys, ed. by Büsse et al. (2018). With contributions by Andrea Bagnato & Anna Positano, Crystal Bennes, Leonardo Dellanoce, Ana María Gómez López & Femke Herregraven, D. Habets, S. Schäfer & C. S. Hu, Ada Kwan, Marit Mihklepp, Skye Morét, Élisée Reclus, Bethany Rigby, Sim Chi Yin.
Migrant Journal 4: Dark Matters, ed. by Büsse et al. (2018). With contributions by Benjamin H. Bratton, Alice Bucknell, Javier Corso, C. S. Hu, Giorgos Kassiteridis, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes & A. George Bajalia, Max Opray, Parsa Sanjana Sajid, Mauro Tosarelli, Yeb Wiersma & Ishion Hutchinson.
Migrant Journal 3: Flowing Grounds, ed. by Büsse et al. (2017). With contributions by Avalanche, Lindsay Bremner, Display Distribute, Alexis Kalagas, Carlos Kong, Dinh Q. Lê, Konstantin Mitrokhov, James Morgan, Richard Sears, Irene Stracuzzi, Ala Tannir, Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin.
Conferences
Take Back the Land, Royal College of Art, May 2025.
DocTalks x MoMA, September 2024.
The Event of Archaeology, Goethe Instituut, London, May 2024.
LSE Critical Europe Conference, The London School of Economics and Political Science, February 2024.
PGR Conference, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London, December 2023.
Agents of Concern: Images and Empathy, PXL Media Art Design, Hasselt, November 2023.
Publishing Practices, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, June 2023.
Logic, Limits, Contingency. Freie Universität Berlin – Einstein Foundation, Berlin, March 2023.
Methodological Exchanges: Urbanism and Dictatorship, respondent, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London, February 2023.
Architectural Media Research Conference, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London, November 2022.
‘Imaginaries of Indeterminacy in the Age of Logistics’, with Dele Adeyemo and Ibiye Camp, Istanbul Design Biennial, April 2021.
Artist Talk with Mohamed Bourouissa, chair, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, The Photographers' Gallery, London, February 2020.
Stories of Moving Lineage, University of the Arts London, September 2019.
Foreign Agents, Design Museum, London, June 2019.
This is No Longer that Place, The Showroom, London, March 2019.
Micro Odysseys, with Migrant Journal, Tate Modern, London, November 2018.
Beyond Borders Summit, IAM, Techfestival, Copenhagen, September 2018.
Interdependent Publishing, Somerset House, London, July 2018.
Dark Matters, Mecànic, Barcelona, July 2018.
Reading Images, Ivorypress, Madrid, June 2018.
‘Maps/Multitudes’, talk at Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna, February 2017.
A Forum for Collective Arctic Governance, National Museum of Architecture, Oslo, October 2016.
Resource Negotiations, Architectural Association, London, June 2016.
Convened Programmes (selection)
Take Back the Land PGR Symposium, with SoA PhD cohort, Royal College of Art, London, 2025.
Foreign Agents performance series, with Justinien Tribillon, Design Museum, London, 2019.
Parallel Crossings: Migrant Journal exhibition, with Michaela Büsse, STUK, Leuven, 2019.
Dark Matters panel discussion, Mecànic, Barcelona, 2018.
Reading Images panel discussion, Ivorypress, Madrid, 2018.
A Forum for Collective Arctic Governance, with Nabil Ahmed and Markus Richter, National Museum of Architecture, Oslo, 2016.
Resource Negotiations, with After Belonging Agency and Nabil Ahmed, Architectural Association, London, 2016.