Critical Evaluation of the exhibition Concrete and the Immaterial, a culmination of more than five years of collaboration between artists Rita-Josy Haddoub and Paweł Dziadur. The exhibition and symposiums ran from 18 June - 11 July 2025 at Annex London.
The skeleton that is capital(ism) wears a textured suit. The suit is grey, very porous, and is made of an extracted material: Concrete. The hallmark of modern times are concrete buildings, landmarks, roads, and infrastructure. The metric of classification for a region, for a people to be ‘developed’ is directly correlated to how much concrete is present in forms of suspension bridges, soulless skyscrapers, and homes which are devoid of life. A stroke of concrete which washes the cities with supermodernity is what dictates the metrics of life itself.
Artists and researchers, Rita Haddoub and Pawel Dziadur, put concrete under a magnifying glass to unearth its socio-political relationships we encounter in our mundane urban realities. The exhibition juxtaposes the post-Soviet concrete landscapes with that of Lebanon's systemic impasses emerging amidst conflict. Rita Haddoub’s Photo-inquiry into Manufacturing Beirut (2025) explores the emotional and political dimensions of Beirut’s urban fabric through the production of cinder blocks. Capturing scenes from a stone and tile factory in Dekweneh, the video (16:56 min, looped, shot by Merlin Ferret) frames the cinder block as both a material and metaphor where construction and ruin blur. What does it mean to build through destruction? The concrete blocks are like sponges, soaking in endless amounts of labour, and ecological richness from landscapes. The regions where these sites stand, have turned mighty hills which were once brimming with topological richness into mere facades of fragility and emptiness. Construction through monolithic materiality, in this instance from concrete, is a zero sum game: where the magnanimity of urban metropoles is built from extraction of its peripheral environments.
Haddoub’s collaboration with Paweł Dziadur in Beyond Us (2023) expands her inquiry into materiality and infrastructure through an interactive installation that merges concrete, sound, and sensor-based technologies. Developed during a residency at the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, the work features six large béton blocks embedded with DIY electronics, text, and responsive feedback systems. More than static forms, these concrete blocks become animated agents that challenge viewers to engage with their tactile and sonic presence, asking how we locate ourselves within increasingly computational and accelerated environments.
Here, concrete is not merely a building material but a branded and modular symbol of modernity, echoing a legacy of industrial progress often marketed as neutral or emancipatory. The work subtly critiques how these infrastructural forms, while technologically advanced, are embedded in colonial and capitalist histories. As Marc Augé argues in his writings on non-places, contemporary spaces shaped by globalized supermodernity often appear anonymous or placeless, yet they remain politically charged. Beyond Us reveals how even “neutral” infrastructures carry the residues of colonial architectures, repackaged through digital aesthetics and smart systems. In doing so, the installation reclaims material objects as active sites of memory, resistance, and reorientation in a world dominated by invisible networks and abstract systems.
Dziadur’s solo work Et in Terra (2021) merges sound, textile, and the politics of code, creating a complex meditation on language, memory, and technological mediation. At its core is a monochrome Jacquard knit, a fabric historically linked to early computational logic, that functions here as a spectrogram of a Latin Lord’s Prayer. The prayer is punctuated by the explosive sounds of sun rockets, a haunting juxtaposition of sacred language and militarized noise. A rotating camera reads the textile, translating its visual code into sound through custom Arduino software, dissolving the boundaries between image, audio, and machine-readable logic. This interplay between analog material and digital systems echoes Mindy Seu’s interest in techno-material archives and the politics of formatting knowledge. Just as Seu’s Cyberfeminism Index reclaims digital space for feminist and decolonial narratives, Dziadur’s work reveals how textiles, long dismissed as domestic or decorative, can encode histories of violence, faith, and resistance. The Jacquard loom becomes not just a tool, but a storyteller.
Likewise, the speculative world-building of Ursula K. Le Guin offers a useful lens: in her writings, textiles and patterns often serve as metaphors for interconnection and care. Et in Terra weaves together data, sound, and ancestral memory, reminding us that behind code lie very human stories which are often shaped by displacement, conflict, and the shifting ecologies we inhabit. It is a work that resists erasure, asserting the enduring presence of memory even in the most rigid and computational forms which concrete embodies.
To look closely at concrete as Haddoub and Dziadur do, is to trace the threads of extraction, memory, and loss woven into its seemingly inert surface. Like the plants in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, which hold knowledge, reciprocity, and ancestral care, these artworks ask us to listen to the stories our built environments conceal. Concrete may appear lifeless, but it is teeming with unseen histories of the lands from which it is mined, the hands that pour it, the ecologies it flattens, and the power structures it upholds.
Where Kimmerer braids sweetgrass as an act of remembering, Haddoub and Dziadur braid code, sound, images and stone to unearth what is buried beneath the smooth gloss of modernity. Their work urges us to move beyond concrete’s promise of permanence and progress, and instead toward a practice of attentive witnessing, one that sees urban infrastructure not as a neutral backdrop, but as a contested field of politics, memory, and resistance. If concrete has become the skin of the capitalist skeleton, then these works propose a different touch: one that is slower, reciprocal, and rooted in relation and not domination. From the dust of the crushed hill to the hum of a wired block, what grows again might be something softer, more alive.
