Across desert plateaus, volcanic valleys, rewilded grasslands, nuclear ruins, and the braided forests of Meghalaya, CthulhuCosmos gathers fragments of worlds scarred and yet still dreaming. Emerging from my PhD dissertation, this body of work arises out of transdisciplinary research conducted across multiple field sites: the Atacama Desert (Chile), Puga Valley (Ladakh), Nashulai Conservancy (Kenya), the former seabed of the Aral Sea and nuclear test sites of Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan), and the sacred landscapes of Meghalaya (India). These geontologically marked zones serve as epistemic laboratories, places where Indigenous cosmologies, extractive violence, and speculative design converge. The documentation style I adopted became instrumental in raising attention to, registering and documenting shifting affects and shared impressions of a situation. As Andrew Causey argues: ‘to see in order to document an ethnographic experience requires active visual engagement’ (2017, 13). At a point, looking through the camera’s viewfinder led to me responding to my own blindness regarding certain opaque relations and otherwise insurmountable expectations. My camera was provocative as well because of its imposing size (a Canon 5D frame mostly mounted with an 18-135mm lens) and helped me stage the difference evident everywhere, but sometimes a less intrusive DJI Osmo recorded conversations with no care for traditional cinematographic requisites like framing, composition, etc. Sometimes on a walk, the only documentation available was a voice memo, a hastily scribbled drawing in a notebook, or something more ephemeral like drawing in the sand, or watching sunlight being scripted across cave paintings. The wealth of wisdom I received began to challenge the available tool’s ability or perhaps my ability to represent it, and what I encountered was a wealth of sensorial offerings, a woven tapestry of myth, ritual, image, voice, memory and text. The visual methodology I employ draws from the tradition of collage and assemblage as an epistemological strategy. These fragmented compositions refuse the illusion of totality; they are deliberately constructed to signal the impossibility of capturing a world, cosmic, ecological, or relational, in a singular, coherent frame. In this practice, each fragment operates as both presence and absence, gesturing toward what is materially rendered while simultaneously invoking that which lies beyond representation. Metaphors abound, allude and refuse fixity. Overlaps, juxtapositions, and visual dissonances hold open a space of speculation, tension and the unseeable. It resists the resolution of the scientific gaze. What draws me to assemblage as a mode of representation, is the fact that fragments are not failures of coherence but gestures toward what exceeds the frame. The resulting assemblages function as worlds of many worlds, cosmograms of entangled temporalities, epistemes, and affective residues, an invitation to sense what cannot be fully known but is palpably there, just beyond the visible register. I treat collage as a visual form of citation, a means of tracing relationalities that elude capture yet insist on presence.

I rely on and develop this collaborative visual ethnographic methodology as a mode of interrogating different communities’ unique cosmology, even as a I receive them in fragments of conversation, a story here, a walk there, an offhand comment, a ritual, a festival, a blessing… in assemblage I receive and in assemblage I represent. The collages highlighting the ‘scrap like' nature of the offerings and the incomplete and multifaceted interpretations of the hyperobjects in question. What do these cosmologies reveal and conceal, and what kinds of speculative imaginaries they reify? Design researchenables a shared language for dialogue, requiring participant consent and involving interlocutors as co-authors in the creation of these visual works. By inviting community members to visualize and discuss how their local, even personal cosmologies can stimulate global discourse, we reflect together on the affects, knowledges and interests the selection process triggers. I pursue this embodied design ethnography for lack of a better term for its capacity to confront situatedness, to reveal epistemic orientations, affective entanglements, and the values that animate knowledge-making

In the dissertation, I speculate about how threshold craft might serve as a decolonial methodology that stages ontological encounters between ritual and technology, science and myth, the human and more-than-human. The visual artefacts presented here are extensions of that research, each one a situated proposition, a fragment of a larger inquiry into how speculative cosmopolitics might reroute the trajectories of planetary and interplanetary futures.

The images live as speculative offerings that reorient the gaze. They trace pathways into planetary and interplanetary futures carried through listening, sustained by care, and shaped by the patient architectures of kinship. In their unfolding, CthulhuCosmos rehearses a cosmopolitics of encounter, a pluriverse of possible worlds braided together at the thresholds where myth, science, and ceremony meet.