‍Sovereignty has long extended through the thermal world. The manipulation of heat fueled industrial production and transportation, expanding the reach of national and colonial forces. The labor of bodies has been managed through the deployment of food and the implicit regulation of metabolisms, as well as the mass thermal communications of air conditioning. The boundaries of cities, nations, and empires have been enforced through thermal violence, whether the dumping of indigenous people on the frozen prairie or the blasting of prisoners with water cannons in subzero temperatures.

Phnom Penh is being built not only on the foundation of blood bricks, but also climate change as a key driver of debt and entry into modern slavery in brick kilns. Blood bricks embody the converging traumas of modern slavery and climate change in our urban age.

One winter morning red dust spiraled from the surface of a broken road. It rapidly gathered volume as a convoy of border-patrol jeeps whizzed past India’s newly constructed border wall with Bangladesh. This infrastructure encloses significant stretches of the 2545-mile-long India-Bangladesh border, South Asia’s longest international boundary. Unlike the rusty fences and fence-like structures that had earlier divided this landscape, the new barrier was distinguished by furiously coiled barbed wires that were placed between angular iron frames.

On the 7th of October 2018, without warning, a sinkhole opened under a busy footpath in Dazhou City in south-west China. Four people fell in and were killed, only two bodies were retrieved. Three weeks later, CCTV footage in south-east Turkey captured an image of two women falling into a sinkhole that opened underneath them. Miraculously, they both survived without any serious injuries.

At a distance of 280km from the Norwegian mainland, stands what the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage calls one of the “largest and most complex cultural monuments of our time” (Kulturminne Ekofisk). Descending through 75m of the North Sea to subsea formations 2900- 3250m below the seafloor and rising around 100m above the 30m extreme wave threshold, Ekofisk City is a production hub and center of field operations for this extreme south-eastern corner of the Norwegian continental shelf (Kvendseth, 1988).

The South China Sea is politically contested from its surface to its bed. China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Brunei all make claims on the volume of this sea — known variously (the list is not exhaustive) as “the South Sea (南海),” “the East Sea (Biển Đông),” “the Luzon Sea/the Philippine Sea,” and “the Natuna Sea.”

Gyalpo and I walk across the aftermath of an avalanche, as the debris continues to shift beneath and around us. Three years later, the compacted ice is still melting. He is trying not to think of his parents, whose home was here, whom I stayed with the night before the earthquake. I can’t imagine his position.

Although the photographic scenes claim to tell a story of what it is like to experience homelessness during severe weather, the images that coalesced around this encampment in their very representation–ironically–rendered the subjects experiencing homelessness, absent. Like the center of a vortex, the photographs performed the operation of presenting a replete image all the while absenting its alleged content.

A succession; compounding successions; a storied stack; the superposition of time; the folds of the longue durée; materialized temporality. We see it in our mind’s eye: a peeling back that reveals the inner complexity of multi-generational dwelling and deep time. We might even imagine standing next to a cut-away, holding something for scale.

The years-long legal battle between British musicians Robbie Williams and Jimmy Page over Williams's intention to build a swimming pool in his basement has recently come to a close, conditionally in Williams's favor. Page had reason to be concerned: since the late aughts, the super-basement craze among the more well-heeled that has flooded council planning committees and inspired a gimmicky BBC documentary has also wreaked havoc on neighbors.