A photo-inquiry into five years of art-led research, accompanying the Master's thesis 'Concrete and the Search for the Immaterial'. The paper takes an auto-ethnographic approach towards examining the organic cycles of cement's operational and mediated entanglements: violence and its domestication, ruin and tenderness.

Capturing moments of contamination and amity within and beyond the manufacturing site, the concrete cinder blocks are explored as an active medium, and as organic to the city's 'infrastructures of feelings' (Gilmore). Through cycles of maintenance and production, these blocks echo what Léopold Lambert describes in his 'Politics of the Bulldozer': an architecture that takes its reverse, becoming a seemingly political economy of ruin.

Rita Haddoub (b.1996, Lebanon) holds an Honours BSc in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths and is the recipient of an MA scholarship in Media Arts and Cultures MFA. She is an artist-researcher working through resilient technologies, material cultures, and new-media art.

Her research on 'Concrete and the Search for the Immaterial', examines a political economy of ruins through the lens of concrete hollow blocks, prevalent in Beirut's cityscape. Tracing its role in systemic violence, from economic subjugation to endemic wars, it situates concrete within frameworks of racial capitalism and abolitionist geographies.