KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
Am Marktplatz 2
85072 Eichstätt
Jessie.Martin@ku.de
Jessie Martin is a social scientist and photographer of urban spaces. She studies the interplay between places, people, politics and ecology and utilises interdisciplinary visual approaches to reimagine the potential of the spaces we live in while investigating their formation and conceptualisation. An ongoing theme in her work is the right to the city and land ownership; her MA thesis explored and questioned the rise of privately owned and managed public squares in London.
She has a BA in photographic arts from the University of Westminster, and an MA in photography and urban cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. She lectured on the BA photography course at the University of West London from 2018 to 2024, leading modules in Narrative Photography and Photography and Society, while teaching photography at Richmond upon Thames College from 2019 to 2024. She has coordinated conferences held at the Tate Britain and Goldsmiths, University of London, and has a photographic arts practice, curating and participating in exhibitions.
Jessie has presented papers at conferences held by the University of Sussex and the Zagreb Institute of Art History, and published in peer reviewed journals. In 2023 her text ‘Deconstructing understandings of emptiness: an examination of representations of transitory space and ‘non-place’ in photography‘, was published in the book ‘Watching, Waiting: The Photographic Representation of Empty Places’, published by Leuven University Press. She has diverse research interests and after undergoing research into the topic of autobiographical memory and historical family archives, wrote a chapter published in 2023 by IGI Global in a book titled ‘The Handbook of Research on the Relationship between Autobiographical Memory and Photography’.
Practicing Petro-Geographies through Capitalism: Re-articulating Spatial Imaginaries of Power
My research project adopts a transdisciplinary approach to investigate how place is practiced and imagined through the relations of fossil carbons, focusing on petro-geographies as areas experiencing the spatial imprint of petroleum-industrial activities. Using methods of world ecology as well as a praxiological approach, my project acts against the Nature/Human binary to re-articulate how the relations of nature, capital and global power function through petro-geographies and their associated spatial imaginaries.
My research begins in the 75 hectares of land in Ingolstadt formerly home to the oil refineries of Bayernoil, now owned by Audi and the city of Ingolstadt. I am following how fossil carbons have been practiced within and beyond this site, both imaginatively and materially, and across time. Following the relations of fossil carbons outwards from the Ingolstadt site as nexus includes investigation into Bavarian connections with the American South, and Houston as the energy capital of the world, in addition to research into the Transalpine oil pipeline which runs through Ingolstadt, connecting the region with practices and spaces spanning Europe, North Africa, North America and the Middle East.
Utilising visual methods as part of a multispecies ethnography emphasises the multiple relations which co-constitute both petro-geographies and modern place. Through use of active photographing as well as the analysis of archival materials and present imagery of fossil carbon imaginaries, I aim to de- and re-construct established landscapes of power. Utilising a historical viewpoint as well as an understanding of how secondary industries such as oil refining are publicly perceived in the present, I analyse the different ways that nature (including humans) is put to work in the pursuit of power and to accumulate capital. My intention in knowing oil differently is to act against the ontology of oil and know fossil carbons as multispecies entanglements, formed through expansive time and the dynamics of capital.