Six Tales of Animals and Five Related Essays and Projects: Piecing Cities Together by Taking their Objects Apart

Unimaginable global events ripple through time, unsettling coherence and reshaping shared realities. This PhD by practice responds through collage-making and object assembly—methods that collect, layer, and re-narrate fragments. These become tools to retell histories with clarity and ambiguity, precision and imperfection.

How might we speak in nonlinear narratives—of time, of memory, of duration—just as we live them? Here, practice becomes part of everyday life: not performance, but attunement. Less about invention, more about recognition. A practice of noticing. Of revealing what’s overlooked. Of finding beauty in imperfection.

Through art, architecture, and storytelling, the work reimagines how we relate to the built environment. Writing becomes a method of negotiation—between the urge to explain and the necessity of holding things in suspension. Writing of tales became a method of mapping layered realities—where fiction, memory, and history blur.

Animals move quietly through these tales: elephants for memory, mermaids for power, dung beetles for multiple temporalities, horses for labour, whales for environmental perception.

This PhD has taken shape through long-held reflections, both scattered and connected. And somewhere in the process, I realise how much I have spoken—without words—with animals.

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