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How can infrastructure be criminal? How does a road, a prison, a suburban neighbourhood or a dam become a perpetrator of violence and insecurity? Material Crimes answers these questions. Each episode investigates a different piece of infrastructure, tracing its global, colonial connections across time and space. The series shows us how physical sites of everyday life are linked to networks of private and public actors who profit from violence inflicted on spaces and communities on the margins. The series also shines a spotlight on the people-powered movements exposing and challenging the many crimes of infrastructure.

Season 1
 Season 2
Season 3

︎︎︎ About the Project
︎︎︎ Listening Station at Whitechapel Gallery
︎︎︎ A Guide to Making an Episode


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︎︎︎ Episode
︎︎︎ Infrastructure
︎︎︎ Location/Map
︎︎︎ Author




Material Crimes Listening Station at Whitechapel Gallery


Backyard Biennial: East
 Common Room Displays
 Whitechapel Gallery
15.07 — 06.09, 2026

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From 15th July, 2026, Material Crimes will begin sharing its work through a series of mobile listening stations. The first will be hosted by Whitechapel Gallery’s Backyard Biennial: East. Based on collage-work, stories and sounds from across the podcast’s three seasons, this station is one of four interconnected units that fit together to form a whole. Our inaugural station addresses security infrastructures like surveillance technologies and prisons.  Each of the other stations will follow a different yet intertwined infrastructural storyline: extraction, routes, and resistance. These listening stations offer a new way of accessing the ‘true crimes of infrastructure’ explored in the podcast, sharing them with communities in our own local context, where infrastructure’s harms are everywhere.

Frederick Kannemeyer is behind the design, collage and manufacturing of the project with fabrication by Ian McNair. Sound design and editing is by felix taylor.

MATERIAL CRIMES I
SECURITY


Security infrastructure is everywhere. Global chains of surveillance, detention, and policing connect people across the globe. Security firms make billions, prioritising profit over safety. Working class people of colour are always at the sharpest edge of the violence these security infrastructures cause.

This installation weaves together sounds and images from episodes made for the podcast, Material Crimes. It traces security infrastructures across South Africa, Palestine, Cuba, Australia, Kenya, the US and the UK - and countless places in between. The plot-points on the map consist of migrant detention centres in Australia, Guantanamo Bay Prison, the UK’s Department for Works and Pensions, CIA-funded kill squads in Kenya, Israel’s military-prison complex, Johannesburg’s private security firms and Apartheid-era forensics. The installation’s sonic and visual chorus tells the stories of struggles to hold past and present perpetrators of security violence to account, making visible the global corporate interests and legacies of empire that constitute the system of racial capitalism we live in today.   

Download the full exhibition text here


Featured Episodes
︎︎︎ Leaking Guantanamo (Season One: Episode Three, 2022)
︎︎︎ Murder in Melville (Season Two: Episode One, 2024)
︎︎︎ Death by Welfare (Season Two: Episode Two, 2024)
︎︎︎ Night Terror (Season Two: Episode Six, 2024)
︎︎︎ Location, Location, Location (Season Three: Episode One, 2026)
︎︎︎ ‘He Fell from a Piece of Soap’ (Season Three: Episode Two, 2026)
︎︎︎ Free Prisoners (Season Three: Episode Five, 2026)
Queen Mary University of London: www.qmul.ac.uk 

The Independent Social Research Foundation: www.isrf.org
Material Crimes is funded by The Independent Social Research Foundation, The Leverhulme Trust, Queen Mary University of London’s Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations,  .

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