In the shifting terrains of post-2015 Europe, from Norway's fjords to Serbia's forests, immersion in rugged landscapes reveals spaces where human traces merge with natural ecologies, evoking folklore and material agency. Rooted in situated explorations, this praxis probes human-material intersections from peripheral vantage points. Revisiting the series in 2026 Madrid, amid ecological precarity and urban reconfigurations, underscores its timeliness: countering abstract crises with bodily gestures at intimate scales. It queries how minimal removals redefine spatial occupations, treating environments as active participants in drifts where subtraction uncovers latent forces, reclaiming ephemeral tactics against enduring disruptions. The method across the Kingdom Series employs precise subtractions in varied natural settings: from clearing fallen leaves around tree bases in autumnal meadows to removing ivy in forested triangles or piling displaced soil in arid fields. Operations adhere to body-scale rules—arm's reach or walking lengths—using no tools beyond hands, focusing solely on removal without additions, aligned with site contours. This generates liminal forms like circles, triangles, or rhomboids, evoking supernatural motifs yet grounded in ergonomics and temporality, documented via photography for their fleeting nature. As operative devices, these interventions map environmental layers through organic matter, highlighting material logics in decay, regrowth, and human imprint without overt spectacle. Haraway's situated knowledges frame these subtractions as partial, embodied perspectives, rejecting universal objectivity for knowledge rooted in specific positionalities—historical, cultural, bodily—amid human-nonhuman entanglements. Each void emerges from the artist's embedded stance, accountable and locatable, fostering ethical-political reflections on ecological urgencies like the Anthropocene, where situated practices link to posthuman kinships beyond biological ties. Latour's actor-network theory deepens this by treating leaves, soil, ivy, and the intervenor's body as symmetrical actants in heterogeneous networks, reassembling temporary alliances that disrupt anthropocentric hierarchies and reveal relational agencies in material ecologies. Bratton's The Stack extends the critique, positioning these micro-interventions as probes into planetary computational layers—from Earth's material strata to Cloud sovereignties—challenging traditional geographies through accidental megastructures, where subtractions query the nomos of computational infrastructures, blending physical voids with virtual drifts in a post-Westphalian order. Extending from initial 2015 Norway actions to 2016 Serbia and beyond, the series drifts across geographies and seasons: leaf circles in Nordic autumns, ivy triangles in Balkan winters, geometric voids in urban peripheries. Propagated via archives, reenactments, and digital mappings, it incorporates temporal repetitions tracking regrowth and climatic shifts, adapting to forests, meadows, or wastelands, fusing folklore with infrastructural inquiries in mobile practices. Operatively closing, the Kingdom Series prompts expansions into diverse terrains or virtual domains, encouraging collective subtractions to amplify agencies in uncertain ecologies.
