Reading uneven power structures and racial hierarchies through infrastructure
Zannah Mae Matson's research and design work focus on the histories and contemporary reinterpretations of landscapes throughout processes of colonization, violence, and state infrastructure projects. Her current project focuses on a highway development project in Colombia's eastern piedmont region in an investigation that brings together questions of landscape visuality, infrastructural promise, state-sponsored colonization, haunting violence, and extractivist economic motivations.
Across her research, Matson aims to bring the critical scholarly tradition of human geography together with the deeply spatial approach of design research in order to address the ongoing operation of coloniality, violence, and racial discrimination. Matson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto and holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Guided by critical geographic theory, she brings together these disciplinary approaches to emphasize the power of visual and spatial production as a practice that can fundamentally challenge narratives of landscape modernity and developmental progress. She has published her work in The Funambulist, Site Magazine, and Society & Space Online, among others, and has exhibited her creative outputs in numerous venues.
In professional practice, Matson has worked with Public Work, MassLBP, and OPSYS Landscape Infrastructure Lab, where she was the Project Manager and Exhibition Designer for the Canada Pavilion at the Venice 2016 Biennale Architettura. The exhibition, titled EXTRACTION, has been written about in The Walrus, The Globe and Mail, Border Lines, and Azure Magazine and won the Azure Magazine 2017 Award for Social Good because of the project's commitment to revealing the social and ecological impacts of resource extraction on Indigenous territory.
As an educator, Matson is deeply committed to critical pedagogy that emphasizes accessibility and creating spaces for learning and unlearning. She has developed her approach to teaching as a studio instructor at the Ryerson School of Urban and Regional Planning, co-teaching a design-intensive course at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and as a course instructor at the University of Toronto's Department of Geography and Planning.
