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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 (Coming Soon)

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


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“You are Listening to Material Crimes”
- Introduction to the Series

In this episode, Surviving Society hosts Chantelle Lewis and Tissot Regis talk with Maia Holtermann Entwistle and Sharri Plonski about what it was like to create and produce the Material Crimes series. They discuss how each episode feeds into an intellectual arc that tries to understand the relationship between colonialism, capitalism, and the material infrastructures that shape everyday life. Straddling the “infrastructural crimes” highlighted by each episode, they discuss how states and corporations profit from infrastructure, but also how infrastructure creates opportunities for powerful people-led movements that challenge infrastructural violence and impunity. You’ll also hear them talk about the joys and difficulties of intellectual collaboration, and how it can help us survive the academy!