Building Without Permission Chapter 2

“Bits and strips of aluminum are connected in such a way that their aggregation produces a larger, more complex communal entity. This way of building sculptural form serves as a metaphor for the relationship of the individual to community.”—El Anatsui

1. The Residue of Circulation#

[1] A single bottle cap weighs almost nothing. Flattened, it is smaller than a coin—a disc of aluminum stamped with a brand name, dented from the opener that pried it loose, scratched and oxidized from the handling that followed. But the cap is not empty. It is the endpoint of a commodity chain that moved European liquor into West Africa along routes established during the colonial period. The brand names printed on its surface are the signatures of a trade system that reorganized labor, desire, and dependency across the Gulf of Guinea for centuries. The dents and oxidation are not incidental. They are the physical residue of a circulation system whose violence was designed to be too ordinary to notice.

[2] El Anatsui has spent five decades learning to read that residue. Before the bottle caps, there were weathered planks pulled from local environments in southeastern Nigeria, cut and burned until their surfaces held the pressures of colonial encounter in their grain. Before the wood, there was clay—pots broken apart and reassembled according to a principle he learned in his home community, where breakage does not end an object but releases it into new use. And before any studio material, there were Ghanaian textiles whose woven symbols condensed entire philosophies into the architecture of cloth—surfaces that taught him meaning could be embedded in a material through the accumulated history of its making and use. Each stage sharpened a single conviction: no material arrives neutral. The artist’s task is not to impose meaning but to reorganize what the material has already absorbed.

[3] The bottle caps brought this conviction to its fullest scale. Assembled in the thousands, flattened and stitched together with copper wire by Anatsui and his assistants, they accrue into massive suspended sheets whose weight, movement, and texture are inseparable from the histories compressed into each fragment. The sheets sag under gravity, shift with each installation, and refuse to hold a single fixed form. They are assemblages built from the actual debris of extractive economies, carrying the accumulated force of those economies in their surfaces—and behaving unpredictably inside the institutions that try to display them.

[4] What these material systems produce becomes legible at an institutional scale. At the 2007 Venice Biennale, the sheets filled an entire bay of the Arsenale and draped the four-story facade of the Palazzo Fortuny, moving between interior and exterior, institutional wall and Gothic palace front, their weight and texture responding differently to each surface they encountered. When they filled the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern, they reorganized a post-industrial monument around materials shaped by the very histories that monument was built to supersede. These same sheets now command millions at auction—Prophet, a 2012 bottle-cap assemblage, sold at Christie’s for $2.2 million in 2023—their passage from roadside discard to blue-chip commodity tracing yet another circuit of value that the work does not escape. The bottle cap that began as colonial packaging, passed through consumption and discard, and entered the studio as raw material now circulates again as a luxury commodity. The work does not stand outside the economies it interrogates. It moves through them on altered terms.

[5] This chapter traces how Anatsui arrived at this practice and what it produces. It begins with the material premise—that surfaces register the pressures of the worlds they have passed through—and follows its development from wood and clay through the bottle cap sheets. It then examines the construction of the sheets themselves: the labor, the stitching, the engineered flexibility that makes nonfixity a method rather than an effect. And it ends with what happens when these materials enter institutional space—how they force museums, biennials, and galleries to negotiate with forms that refuse the stability on which display, conservation, and classification depend. In doing so, the sheets reorganize not only institutional procedures but the social life of the spaces that host them. Anatsui’s practice is the foundation on which this thesis builds. He establishes that the materials of extraction, once reorganized, do not merely remember the systems that produced them. They generate new conditions of force—conditions that the chapters on Mark Bradford and Theaster Gates will carry forward.

2. Materials as Historical Systems#

[6] The conviction that materials carry the pressures of the worlds that shaped them has a specific origin. When Anatsui first encountered Ghanaian textiles, he recognized that a surface could carry thought before an artist ever touched it. As he describes: “These symbols had meaning. They were associated with some aphorisms or sayings, or some proverbs… abstract ideas like versatility, omnipotence, or God, the soul, and so on.” What struck him was not the iconographic content alone but the deeper structural lesson: that meaning could be embedded in a material through the accumulated history of its making and use. This became the basis of his method.

[7] The Ghanaian textiles ground this premise in how cloth is physically made. In strip-woven kente and cloths marked with Adinkra signs, meaning is not applied to a finished surface—it is built into the architecture of the fabric itself. Narrow strips are woven individually and then joined into larger fields whose seams remain visible. Motifs condense proverbs and social histories, but equally important is the construction that holds them: discrete units retain their identity even as they form a larger whole, and the joints between them shape how the surface communicates. This is the structural lesson that stays with Anatsui. When he later assembles thousands of metal fragments into flexible sheets, he is not invoking cloth by appearance. He is adapting a principle of construction—that a surface can be built from many individually marked parts whose connections remain legible, and that meaning can originate in how something is made before any imagery or iconography enters the work.

[8] The emphasis on weaving in critical literature, as Yemi Onafuwa observes, “perhaps says more about curatorial thinking in the United States and the United Kingdom … than about Anatsui’s own priorities.” The textile analogy, in other words, is itself a form of institutional framing—one that assimilates the work into familiar categories rather than following its actual logic. What Anatsui took from textiles was not a visual vocabulary but the adinkra motifs’ capacity to encode meaning into graphic form and the strip-woven construction’s principle of modular assembly. The textile logic provides him with an epistemology of the surface. What it did not provide was a material that had already been acted on by historical force.

[9] The weathered planks of southeastern Nigeria supplied what textiles could not. When Anatsui arrived at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, in the 1970s, he entered a studio culture forged in the aftermath of the Biafran War—one grounded in improvisation, reuse, and sustained attention to local environments. That culture carried a conviction that materials and environments are inseparable from the art they produce: “Art is something that is environment based… if you take a tree that thrives in the tropics and plant it in a temperate clime, it might not survive. The same can apply to an artist. If what you derive your nurture from is not much in the new environment, you might find it difficult to create.” Nsukka itself modeled this principle. Its surfaces rust, peel, and shift over time—deterioration that Anatsui learned to read as accumulated evidence rather than loss.

[10] Anatsui went further than reading these surfaces. He turned damage into the content of the work itself, cutting, carving, and burning weathered planks until their surfaces became stressed, blistered, and scarred—panels “bound together by surface marks, designs and motifs cut with mechanical tools or burnt into them.” These marks registered what he calls “the brutality of the colonial encounter.” What emerges in the wood pieces is the first articulation of a principle that will govern everything that follows: the surface does not represent history. It holds history physically, in the cuts, burns, and stress lines that record the pressures exerted on the material before the artist ever intervened.

[11] Clay made this logic unmistakable. In his home community, breakage was not destruction but transformation—a shift that released capacities already latent in the material. Anatsui noticed that pots were made for almost every occasion, every event, every stage of life—and that when a pot breaks, “it passes to a more useful, more varied use. In other words, the breaking of a pot makes it more useful.” Anatsui carried this principle into the studio. His ceramic works from the late 1970s were built from slabs of clay and from completely unfired pots that he cut apart, mixing fresh local Nigerian clay with manganese from Ghana—symbolically blending the sources of his inspiration. The resulting surfaces, dark and flecked when fired, bore the marks of their own fracture. His Broken Pot series pursued this principle directly, exploring “fragility not as an end to things, but as a generator of new life.” Once an object comes apart, its past can be read on its edges and surfaces, and Anatsui turns that exposed history into the basis for a new form. This is the moment his practice takes philosophical shape: materials do not simply store history passively. They become more expressive, more usable, more generative when broken open.

[12] The chainsaw, which Anatsui used extensively in his wood sculptures, was both a cutting instrument and a way of inscribing history into the surface. Its aggressive incision into weathered planks produced what he called “rushing lines”—marks whose speed and violence echoed the histories of industrial extraction that shaped the colonial economy. The chainsaw also opened surfaces, exposing grain, stress, and internal structure that had been invisible before the cut. Burning worked in a similar register: it scarred the surface, but it also revealed how force could become a form of inscription. In both cases, the tool followed pressures already present in the material. The deep gouges and scorched rims reenact extraction at the scale of the studio, making the relationship between force and form available for reorganization. Anatsui activates the damage as the content of his work.

[13] Across the wood and ceramic works, a consistent principle emerges: the marks that matter most are the ones the artist did not make. Stoler provides the most precise language for this operation. Writing about colonial archives, she insists on attending to “unexplored fault lines, ragged edges, and unremarked disruptions to the seamless and smooth surface” of official genres. “Reading along the archival grain,” she writes, “draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form. Working along the grain is not to follow a frictionless course but to enter a field of force and will to power.” Anatsui’s practice enacts this reframing at the level of matter. His scored planks and fractured ceramics are not archives in Stoler’s documentary sense, but they operate by the same logic: their rough surfaces register the forces that produced them, and reading those surfaces—attending to their fault lines, their ragged edges—is the first step in reorganizing what they disclose. The fragment arrives carrying its own record of force. Anatsui’s method begins by reading that record rather than smoothing it away.

[14] When Anatsui began working with bottle caps in the late 1990s, he was no longer handling materials shaped by local pressures alone; he was working with fragments structured by global systems. The shift was gradual—cassava graters cut from discarded oil drums, then milk tins, then bottle caps—but each step drew the material closer to the commodity chains that had organized West African economies since the colonial period. It was the bottle caps that made this history most densely legible. They carry what Anatsui calls a “trade history… traced back to the colonial period, reflecting centuries of economic and cultural exchanges.” Unlike wood or clay, the bottle cap condenses that history into an object small enough to be held in the hand. Each cap carries the creases, stains, and corrosion left by its passage through that circuit—the marks of its handling, its consumption, and the disposable economy it sustained.

[15] Achille Mbembe names the sovereign framework behind that economy. Politique indigène, as he defines it, “set out how to dispose of this raw material, how to increase it, what laws to impose on it, what punishments and penalties and tortures to inflict on it.” The bottle cap is what remains after that logic of disposal has run its course. It is not a record of a single act of violence. It is the residue of a system that organized extraction, consumption, and waste into a self-sustaining cycle—one in which the objects that passed through it were never meant to be read as evidence of anything at all. Anatsui makes them legible as exactly that.

[16] But where Politique indigène names the sovereign power that produced these objects, it does not yet explain how that power disappeared into the ordinary. This is what the bottle caps reveal at scale. Assembled in the thousands, they accrue into a surface where the architecture of colonial circulation becomes visible—not as a represented narrative but as a material fact, held in the aggregate weight of innumerable small objects. Each cap entered circulation as packaging, was handled, discarded, and accumulated in the landscapes where Anatsui found them, its deformations recording the slow normalization of extraction as an everyday fact.

[17] Mbembe provides the language for how that normalization worked. Colonial violence, he argues, did not sustain itself through spectacular ruptures alone; it “crystallized, through a gradual accumulation of numerous acts and rituals—in short, played so important a role in everyday life that it ended up constituting the central cultural imaginary that the state shared with society.” The bottle cap is an artifact of exactly this crystallization—an object so ordinary that the system it served could pass as nature. Stoler’s rough surfaces and Mbembe’s accumulated rituals converge here: the fragment’s legibility depends not on what was done to it in one dramatic moment but on the compounding of countless small forces that left their traces in the metal. From the scored planks of Nsukka to the fractured ceramics to the thousands of aluminum caps gathered from roadsides and markets, Anatsui’s materials arrive in the studio already inscribed—each surface a compressed record of the forces that shaped it, each fragment carrying more history than any single gesture could impose.

3. Material Transformation#

[18] In the studio, each cap passes through a sequence of operations that constitute its own form of historical argument. Caps—in the studio’s own vocabulary, “corks”—are flattened and shaped into “formats” invented by Anatsui, then “coupled” using copper wire in precisely defined ways to form units called “blocks.” Assistants select the tops they need, cut and tear them apart, and shape elements that they then wire together with precut lengths of copper wire before the finished blocks are counted, piled on shelves, and ordered by type and color, ready for the artist to compose with. The sheet is made by “joining” the blocks “together like the blocks of a quilt.” These joins are not interchangeable. Where the wire pulls tight, the surface cinches; where it is left looser, the sheet buckles, flares, or opens into soft folds. Over thousands of such adjustments, the work’s eventual drape and tension emerge.

[19] What appears from a distance as a continuous plane resolves up close into a network of hinges and pressure points, each carrying the trace of a specific intervention. The instability that viewers often read as atmospheric is grounded in this microscopic architecture of labor and force. Anatsui is explicit about what this labor indexes: “The process… of manually and individually ripping, rolling, crumpling, twisting… not only attempts to valorize an evolutionary pace of doing things but also references the… cheap rating of labor—human labor, over the greater part of the planet.” The construction does not merely assemble fragments. It reenacts, at the scale of the studio, the manual processes that global economies have historically rendered invisible.

[20] The small, visible joins never disappear. They keep each component distinct—its scratches, its discoloration, its specific marks of handling still legible within the larger surface. The individual cap is never absorbed into the whole. It insists on its prior life. Colonial power, as Mbembe argues, operated by the opposite principle—reducing the colonized to a “body-thing,” “neither the substratum nor the affirmation of any spirit,” stripped of particularity and rendered interchangeable. The bottle caps were products of that system, manufactured to be consumed and discarded without differentiation. Anatsui’s stitching works against that reduction. Each cap remains legible within the whole, its specific marks preserved rather than dissolved into a uniform surface.

[21] The bottle caps carry more than the residue of colonial commerce. They also carry the ecological costs of the material they are made from. The extraction of oil, minerals, and other carbon-based resources across Africa entails “serious ecological disturbance imperiling human and nonhuman lives across the continent.” Aluminum begins as bauxite, and its extraction through strip mining destroys forests, contaminates waterways, and generates toxic waste across West Africa. Each bottle cap is the endpoint of this environmentally destructive chain. By the time the caps enter circulation, pass through markets, and are discarded, they already carry the imprint of these ecological costs. When the sheets drift, sag, ripple, and breathe in response to air and temperature, they are not merely mimicking atmospheric behavior. They are registering ecological damage as a condition of the work’s form. The movements of the sheet become an index of the movements that produced the metal itself—the industrial processes, the waste, the planetary costs that the commodity form was designed to render invisible.

[22] At the same time, the metal sheets extend a conceptual principle that has been present since Anatsui’s earliest works: the fragment as a historical unit. In the bottle-cap sheets, this principle expands in scale and density. Where the chainsaw once indexed local forms of extraction, the compressions and markings on aluminum index global circuits of labor and trade. As Kwame Anthony Appiah observes, the materials that form these compositions are “found materials, discarded because others can no longer find uses for them,” their former lives in economies of waste and consumption remaining visible on their surfaces. The shift from wood to metal does not transform the underlying method; it expands its scale. The fragment—first a clay shard, then a scorched plank, now an aluminum cap—continues to serve as the unit through which submerged histories of trade, labor, and circulation become legible. What remained to be tested was what these fragments would do when assembled at monumental scale inside institutions built to contain and classify them.

[23] The 2007 Venice Biennale was the moment when Anatsui’s metal sheets confronted institutional architecture at their most monumental scale. Robert Storr, the Biennale’s curator, offered Anatsui an entire bay of the Arsenale, where two facing walls were built for him spanning nearly the full height and width of the building. Anatsui filled them with three formally different works—Dusasa I, Dusasa II, and Fresh and Fading Memories—each demonstrating different capabilities of the bottle cap medium, draping in its own way, and carrying a distinct texture and color palette. The variation was deliberate. It refused to let any single configuration stand as representative. After walking the length of the Arsenale past works addressing political violence and environmental destruction, visitors encountered Dusasa I at the far end of the building—its gold-red-and-black surface facing them from a distance, what Vogel describes as “a destination and a benediction.” The sheets did not illustrate the themes surrounding them. They reorganized the viewer’s passage through the space, transforming the Arsenale’s endpoint into an encounter with materials shaped by the very histories the rest of the exhibition could only depict.

[24] Each of the three works produced a different spatial result because the sheets interacted with the Arsenale’s walls, columns, and irregularities in specific ways. Instead of presenting a single coherent image, the installation revealed how inherited infrastructures respond when confronted with materials shaped by other histories. A site built to affirm national identity found itself accommodating objects whose formal decisions came from elsewhere—from the uneven circuits of production, discard, and reuse that shaped the metal long before it entered the Biennale. Dusasa made clear that when these materials scale up, they alter the space that hosts them.

[25] By assembling waste into a material system that remains open, flexible, and structurally unsettled, Anatsui offers a different model of how history can operate. The metal sheets are not monuments to the past. They are provisional structures that treat history as something that can be actively reorganized rather than hidden away and preserved. They refuse the idea that inherited forms must remain intact. Anatsui frequently returns to the metaphor of broken pottery to describe this principle, where “breaking is not destruction but a necessity for rebirth”—and where “you need breaking, to regenerate new and stronger forms.” Each installation relaxes the material into a new configuration, and the history held in the fragments is not lost but redistributed. This is the hinge that leads to nonfixity. Once material is understood as something that carries past pressures and can still be reshaped, the question becomes not only how history is remembered, but how it is kept in motion.

4. Nonfixity as Method#

[26] Anatsui’s sheets are built to resist completion. A fixed configuration would betray the very conditions the material has lived through. The refusal has institutional consequences. Museums depend on objects that can be stabilized, catalogued, and retrieved in consistent form. Anatsui’s sheets are built so that gravity, handling, and architecture continually alter their contours. The work never settles, and neither do the histories it carries. Every configuration is provisional, which means every institution that hosts the sheets must contend with an object that will look different tomorrow than it does today.

[27] Anatsui is explicit about his aspiration: “My idea initially was that I was doing sculpture—sculpture so free that you can change its form in any way.” That freedom has spatial consequences. When the sheets are installed in Venice, Brooklyn, Princeton, or Accra, they do not return to a prior state; they generate new ones. Anatsui describes this capacity as a “nomadic aesthetic”—works that can be bundled, packed, and transported, generating a new configuration each time they are unfolded in a different space. The work’s portability is not incidental to its meaning—it is the mechanism through which each new site produces a genuinely different encounter. As Anatsui describes it: “The nearest I can think of for my idea of the non-fixed form… is the transposing and modulation in music.” Every installation is a transposition—recognizably the same work, but formally different enough that no museum can treat a previous version as the definitive one. The work requires the space to negotiate with it.

[28] The negotiation between work and space reveals what the gallery’s design is built to conceal. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault describes how institutional power operates through “distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them... maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of observation, registration and recording.” The museum gallery performs these same operations on the objects it houses: it distributes artworks across rooms, fixes them in designated positions, classifies them by period and provenance, and maintains them under controlled lighting and regulated sightlines. Anatsui’s sheets refuse each of these operations. Their form shifts under gravity, generates a new version with every installation, and changes under every lighting condition. The museum’s authority depends on objects that submit to these procedures; Anatsui’s sheets do not.

[29] Beyond display, the sheets challenge how the museum produces knowledge about its holdings. No definitive version of the work can be diagrammed; no particular installation can be recorded as authoritative. The question is why this impossibility matters so much to the institution. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida argues that the archontic principle of the archive is also “a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together”—the coordination of holdings into a unified, retrievable configuration. Anatsui’s sheets strip that guarantee of its foundation. The conservation file, the catalogue entry, the installation photograph: each captures a state the work has already left behind. The archive accumulates versions without converging on an original. What the museum knows about the work is always partial, always superseded, always one installation out of date. The procedures that give institutions epistemic authority over their collections—the ability to say this is what the work is—lose traction when the object itself will not resolve into a single, knowable state.

[30] Nonfixity does more than disrupt institutional systems. It redistributes creative agency. Because the sheets must be reconfigured with every installation, no single hand can claim final authority over what the work becomes. Anatsui describes the dynamic directly: “An artisan… might think he made a mistake, but [to] the artist… it might suggest a new direction.… In my studio practice, I want my assistants to behave like artisans. But when they make mistakes, as the artist, I own the mistake, and it is my responsibility to get something else out of it.” The assistants’ errors—a wire twisted too tight, caps joined off-angle—are not corrected. They become part of the sheet. A wire pulled too tight cinches the surface; caps joined off-angle redirect how the metal falls. The installers who negotiate weight and architecture in Venice or London produce the specific configuration that viewers encounter. “My work has a lot to do with time,” Anatsui explains. “What you hear it say at a particular time is different from what it will sound like another time.” Authorship becomes cumulative—a chain of interventions distributed across places, hands, and moments.

[31] This distribution extends beyond the aesthetic. Vogel notes that community is “at the core of Anatsui’s studio practice, not only out of practical necessity but because working with groups of people is satisfying and stimulating to him.” The studio, embedded within the University of Nigeria and drawing on the broader intellectual life of Nsukka, operates as a site where shared histories are collectively handled and reorganized through material practice. When the sheets leave the studio and enter institutional space, they carry that collective logic with them—and the viewers who move around and through configurations that the architecture did not anticipate extend it further. The work generates shared encounter wherever it is installed.

[32] The sheets also refuse the temporal logic on which hegemonic historical narratives depend. Institutional histories tend toward linearity—an origin, a progression, a resolution sealed behind a vitrine. The museum reinforces this by presenting objects as fixed points in a developmental sequence: this period led to that movement, which produced this masterwork. Anatsui’s sheets cannot occupy that kind of time. Each installation is a new historical proposition—a temporary arrangement of materials shaped by colonial trade, industrial extraction, and collective labor, held together by tensions that will shift the next time the work is hung. The traces of the past remain active in the metal. Walter Benjamin warned that “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” Museums enforce precisely this disappearance by selecting which pasts to stabilize and letting others fall away. Anatsui’s sheets resist that selection. The past stays in play—reorganized, reweighted, but never resolved.

[33] Nonfixity, then, is more than a formal condition. It is a structural challenge to the systems of legibility and control on which institutional authority depends. The question that remains is what this challenge produces when the sheets enter specific sites of power—when the building is a post-industrial monument, a national pavilion, or a biennale stage.

5. Reordering Power#

[34] When the sheets entered Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, they did not adapt to the building. They restructured it. The Behind the Red Moon catalogue notes that the hangings “visually and conceptually challenge the post-industrial scale and architectural symmetry of the Turbine Hall,” but what matters is the specific mechanism of that challenge. Dense folds redirected movement through a space designed for unobstructed industrial flow, and the sheets sagged and pressed against their rigging points until the mounting system had to adjust—the building yielding to a surface assembled from thousands of discarded bottle caps. Congregation points formed where the metal sagged or opened; movement slowed where folds compressed the sightline. Anatsui’s studio operates through what Vogel calls “the creation of a work by a collectivity of individuals guided by the artist,” and that collective practice did not stop at the studio door. In the Turbine Hall, the sheets extended it to viewers—producing a shared encounter, responsive movement, and temporary gathering in a space whose original function was to generate power for the city. The building once produced energy. Anatsui’s work made it produce a public.

[35] The same institutions that must adjust to Anatsui’s work also canonize it. The Venice Biennale awarded him the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in 2015. The sheets now hang in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the British Museum. That embrace is not a contradiction that weakens the work—it reveals the terms on which the contest is fought. Counter-hegemonic practice does not require standing outside the institution. It requires that what happens inside the institution remain beyond the institution’s full control. The system remains in place, but its terms of operation shift. This is what counter-hegemonic practice looks like when it works through materials rather than manifestos—not the overthrow of institutional power, but its ongoing destabilization by objects that carry other histories and refuse to let them settle.

6. Reconfiguring the World Through Matter#

[36] Anatsui’s sheets do not operate against the museum. They operate through it. The museum provides the frame within which a surface assembled from discarded bottle caps registers as something other than waste. It supplies the conservation apparatus the sheets defeat, the archival procedures they outpace, the controlled sightlines they refuse. Anatsui needs those systems in order to press against them. Without the Turbine Hall, there is no public. Without the Arsenale, there is no structural resistance. The museum is not only the target of Anatsui’s practice. It is the condition of its force.

[37] And the institutional legitimacy that makes the work’s public encounters possible is inseparable from the market that now surrounds it. The bottle cap that began as colonial packaging does not stop circulating once Anatsui stitches it into a sheet. It finds new economies, new handlers, and new forms of value. The work that makes extraction visible does not stand outside the systems it addresses. It moves through them on altered terms. Gramsci’s war of position is waged not from outside the structures of civil society but through them, and Anatsui wages it in metal.

[38] Anatsui’s practice reaches its limit at the museum door. His sheets can destabilize institutional power from within, but they remain dependent on the institutions they press against. The question the thesis now carries forward is what counter-hegemonic practice looks like when it operates beyond the museum’s walls—in materials drawn not from transnational commodity chains but from the immediate surfaces of a neighborhood, and in spaces the artist does not borrow but inhabits. Mark Bradford’s practice begins there. He works with merchant posters, endpapers, and street detritus pulled from the surfaces of South Los Angeles—matter shaped by the daily machinery of urban neglect, predatory lending, and racial containment. Where Anatsui’s bottle caps trace oceanic routes established during the colonial period, Bradford’s materials come from the neighborhood he lives in. The distance between artist and material collapses, and with it, the relationship between practice and place transforms. The material changes. The logic of reorganization continues.