theoretical sinkholes, 2025

examines the fracture between theory and realities, looking closely at the theories that mobilise architectural researchers to reveal implicit differences between them that existing scholarship has not fully addressed. It questions whether these theories are truly similar or fundamentally different, whether they enact the claims they make, and where they diverge from one another or inadvertently reproduce the injustices they seek to challenge.

To trace these relationships, I used mapping as a method. This extended mapping, which I call theoretical sinkholes , shows common themes, similarities, differences, temporalities, methods, and concepts among today’s widely cited theorists. Encountering Povinelli's insistence that we must change the order in which we produce theory — beginning not from the axiom that existence is entangled, but from the ancestral present of racial and colonial violence — was an awakening moment for this mapping, and led me to question how, and in which order, I am thinking through this body of work (2021, p.1-11).

In Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism, Povinelli argues two points that challenge recent habitual ways of thinking (Povinelli, 2021, p.1-11). First, the order in which we build our theories matters: starting from the ontological claim that existence is entangled — a claim grounded in Western ontology and epistemology — perpetuates colonial reasoning even when the goal is to question it. Second, she draws attention to ancestral catastrophes: climate change, mountains of waste, and floating plastics are not catastrophes on the horizon, coming toward us, but ancestral ones, begun with the violent dispossession and exploitation of humans and more-than-human beings that also produced liberalism and capitalism, along with the systems that hide this ongoing structural violence (2021, p.2).

Reading this body of work through Povinelli's intervention, I suggest these theories can be positioned according to two key patterns that differentiate them: how they understand the temporality of catastrophe — whether future, present, or ancestral — through their level of abstraction when theorising contemporary troubles, and how they conceptualise entanglement, either ontologically or through violence. Future- and present-oriented framings that do not acknowledge the intensification of violence on specific bodies and lands, together with high levels of abstraction, can implicitly shift attention from responsible actors to a generalised "everyone," thereby stabilising extraction and violence instead of fully addressing them. I therefore argue that site- and violence-specificity become ethical requirements for thinking with exhausted geographies: not only representing the present or speculating about the future but telling and showing why these geographies and bodies have been exhausted, by whom, and for whom.