Guest Room:
Sarker Protick & Donald Weber

Guest Room fosters collaboration and sparks creative exchange. For this edition, photographer and visual artist Sarker Protick joins forces with photographer and Aalto University associate professor Donald Weber to explore the following theme:

"Architectures of Power"

"Power drifts between what is visible and what is hidden. Images act like decrees, shaping how we see land, people, and histories. They have been used to plan, police, extract, and persuade but they can also challenge and resist those forces. Power is not abstract; it is material. It is built, zoned, cooled, metered, lit, and secured. It lives in roads, substations, fibre routes, warehouses, ports, and data centres – the architectures of power that draw energy and water, control movement, and reshape neighbourhoods. Photography can trace these structures, making so-called ‘immaterial’ ideologies tangible by showing how they bind energy, water, land, and labour. Histories persist in easements, parcel lines, and place names, shaping how power is experienced, felt, and lived. Archives are infrastructures too – systems that classify, index, and withhold. Photographs have long served states and corporations as tools of proof and persuasion. Yet they also circulate as counter-evidence, disrupting official records and surfacing local and situated knowledge. We invite series that treat photography not only as expression, but also as method and evidence. Field photographs, rephotography, technical or administrative images, public records, and community documentation are all welcome – alongside more interpretive and experimental approaches."