We would like to invite you to the next Teatime Talk as part of the series "Planetability" on Wednesday, July 8th 2026 at 4:00 p.m. at the CityScience Lab Elbakarden (Hongkongstraße 8, 20457 Hamburg).

Clouds on the Ground: Toward a Cognitive Mapping of Matter-Maps

David Sperling (USP)

About the Lecture:
This talk proposes the notion of matter-maps as an update to the aesthetics of cognitive mapping in response to the contemporary crises of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Francis Alÿs’s Tornado and reflections on image-enigmas as a defining perceptual condition of the present, it argues that the complexity of contemporary socio-technical systems demands new forms of political, spatial, and ecological orientation.

The discussion is situated within the field of critical cartographies, understood as practices of spatializing information that, through aesthetic experimentation, make visible the relationships, infrastructures, and conflicts concealed by dominant regimes of representation. Engaging with the work of Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, and other authors, the talk argues that the contemporary crisis is also a crisis of orientation. While Latour proposes the Terrestrial as a new political attractor, Jameson offers cognitive mapping as a means of understanding complex global systems. Yet his formulation requires updating in order to incorporate the interdependencies between human and nonhuman actors.
Within this framework, digital and financial “clouds” are reinterpreted through their material foundations: mines, data centers, submarine cables, energy resources, and ecosystems. The cloud, therefore, is made of ground. Mapping these relations becomes essential for understanding emerging forms of power, extraction, and governance.

The presentation outlines five possible lines of inquiry into matter-maps: speculative transdisciplinary cartographies; material infrastructures and data colonialism; structures of biopolitical governance; more-than-human ecologies; and the ground as the substrate of matter-maps. Ultimately, it argues that matter-maps operate as devices of reflection and intervention, capable of generating new forms of political imagination and new ways of inhabiting the planet in a time of socio-environmental collapse.

About the Lecturer:
David Sperling holds a Bachelor's degree in Architecture and Urbanism, a Master's degree in Theory and History of Architecture, and a Ph.D. in Architecture and Urbanism (Design, Space and Culture), all from the University of São Paulo (USP). He is Full Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (IAU-USP), Coordinator of the Center for Contemporary Spatialities Studies (NEC-IAU-USP), and Coordinator of the Art, Science and Technology Group (ACT>IEA-USP). He also serves as Vice-Coordinator of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo, São Carlos Campus. He has been a Visiting Professor at Humboldt University Berlin and Leuphana University Lüneburg, as well as at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Argentina). He is the author of Cartografias Críticas: Ensaios tecnopolíticos e geopoéticos [Critical Cartographies: Technopolitical and Geopoetic Essays] (Rio Books, 2025) and co-editor of Atlas do Chão [Ground Atlas] (atlasdochao.org). His current research focuses on technopolitical mappings of neo-extractivisms and geopoetic cartographies of the Guarani Aquifer.

Planetability: Co-habitation in the Planetary

Planetability brings together German and Brazilian researchers across Urban Design, Engineering, Architecture, Urban Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Biology to advance a critical interdisciplinary understanding of Planetary Health. The project integrates recent debates on “multispecies urbanism” and the future design of healthy and equitable cities. It is funded by  DAAD-CAPES PROBRAL and co-led by Jamie-Scott Baxter (HCU), Laura Kemmer (USP), David Sperling (USP) and Tatiana Souza de Camargo (UFRGS).

Planetability combines three interlinked dimensions: planetary health, planetary thinking, and planetary transformation. Each dimension addresses a gap and enriches existing scholarship in the others. The field of planetary health, particularly prominent in Brazilian debates, emphasises the interconnection between human and environmental health under climate change. Whereas multispecies urbanism applies critical social theory under the umbrella of planetary thinking to urban contexts. For example, where traditional global health research has been criticised for reducing the environment to a determinant of human health, planetability opens the category of the environment to the multiple forms of life, elements and abiotic forces that constitute it. By drawing on critical feminist theory, this approach is attentive to the ways agency and, in turn, health are distributed the performed in human-nonhuman constellations. Together, these first two dimensions provide the grounding for the third: to examine planetary transformations through the lens of human and nonhuman health relations and the possibility of just and ethical forms of urban cohabitation.