Untitled (That Which Never Was)

Untitled (That Which Never Was) is a triptych of experimental video works emerging from an ongoing research practice concerned with a specific affective condition of the contemporary city: the manner in which erased histories, failed futures, and spectral presences persist within, and are actively produced by, the surfaces of supermodern non-place. The work does not seek to document this condition; rather, it attempts to inhabit it, asking what forms of knowledge are available only through sustained, embodied, and technologically-mediated encounters with the disjunctive temporalities of urban life.
The three works share a common materiality: footage gathered during extended journeys through Lisbon, a city to which I neither belong nor am I a visitor. Its surfaces carry the legacy of post-imperial decline, rapid gentrification, and the tourist-facing erasure of working-class and diasporic life, resulting in an increasingly contested and unstable present. Although undoubtedly echoing the privileged drift of the flâneur, these journeys were developed in tension: structured by the enforced pauses of a city in rapid, politically contested transformation. The Airbnb-ification of central Lisbon has accelerated the displacement of working-class and diasporic communities into precarious peripheries, and that displacement now finds its political articulation in the rising force of Chega.
The writing of Marc Augé has positioned such spaces not as voids but as palimpsests, supermodern environments in which the traces of what has been displaced remain active beneath the surface of the new. The non-place, in this reading, is not an absence but a suppression: a contractual smoothness that is working, continuously and with effort, to hold competing temporalities apart. The research imperative of my journeying practice is to find a methodology equal to that persistence: one that neither aestheticises absence nor resolves it, but stays with the misalignment long enough for it to become legible.
Refusing any single capturing logic, the work employs a promiscuous range of techniques, held together by the research proposition rather than by medium. Among these, Gaussian splatting is employed not as a tool of photorealistic reconstruction but as what Poell et al. have called ‘Gaussian hacking’ (2025: 160): a deliberate exploitation of the technique’s inherent visual instabilities to produce what they describe as “mimetic structures for encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and forgetting.” The spectral bleed between overlapping splats — material drawn from different moments of the same journey, or from entirely different sites superimposed over one another — produces a temporal layering that mirrors the condition being investigated. Working from Stiegler’s concept of organology, Li et al. argue that Gaussian splatting functions not simply as a tool but as an ‘inorganic organ’ (2025: 247), actively participating in the cognitive processes of memory and imagination. This resonates with, but does not resolve into, Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs: where the inorganic organ describes how technical objects become integrated into cognition, the BwO resists precisely that organisation, attending instead to the intensities that stratification fails to capture. The splatting that bleeds and refuses to resolve performs both simultaneously. But Gaussian splatting is only one thread in a practice that also includes experimental filmmaking developed through a decades long embodied relationship with Lisbon. It is a city I have visited since childhood and have lived in since 2018, the result is that these films are not made about this condition from the outside; they are made from within it, by a body that carries its own accumulated temporal layering through streets that are at once familiar and increasingly unrecognisable.
My decision to superimpose splat material drawn from journeys across Lisbon is methodological rather than illustrative. It enacts, at the level of the image, the proposition that urban time is never singular: that the contemporary city is always inhabited by multiple temporalities simultaneously, and that the surfaces which appear smooth and contractual are in fact holding those temporalities apart by force. In those moments where geometry fails to resolve and the splats bleed, the films struggle to move toward coherence. That failure is in itself a finding. The move here is toward the hauntological, approaching what Fisher, following Derrida, identifies as the foreclosed futures and unrealised possibilities that continue to haunt the present as structural absences rather than nostalgic traces.
The triptych is offered as an early-stage research output: exploratory, deliberately unresolved, and generative of questions rather than conclusions. It is through this looking-awry that the non-place begins to give up what its surface is working to conceal. Lisbon, understood here as Foucaldian heterotopia, is a space that holds incompatible temporalities in unresolved tension, and in so doing refuses to yield to representation. Instead it seems as though it demands abstraction as its only honest form.