Everyday reports of crises proliferate across different regions today; news about the climate crisis, financial crisis, industrial crisis and cyberattacks have become ordinary, pointing at an increase in vulnerabilities across a range of issues.
This lab takes crisis as a starting rather than an end point, proposing that our future is being contested and constructed through the materiality of politics. It undertakes an investigation of how crises manifest materially in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Through an ethnographic approach to material politics, we develop insights about how crises take shape materially—through bodies, technologies, objects and infrastructures. The research elucidates how disruptions, sabotages, decay, floods and blackouts are prevented, answered, resisted, and remembered in the Baltic region through different material engagements, thus challenging the perception of crises as discrete, isolated events.
We combine a focus on geopolitical infrastructures (such as electrical grids, submarine cables, a railway, bunkers, and a super-battery factory); with attention to ordinary material practices at risk (such as those of refugees and precarious people).
As NATO’s eastern flank and frontline of the EU, the Baltic states are key sites for understanding how crises are no longer confined to single events, but instead embedded in fences, grids, data wires, pipelines, gauges, domestic things, and hybrid borders.

Principal Investigator: Francisco Martínez
Web development & maintenance: Sandro Gambashidze
Photos by Joosep Kivimäe





