Extractive Preservation

Abstract

The thesis investigates how environmental governance operates through the very practices it seeks to regulate. Grounded in the paradox of extractive preservation, it argues that preservation does not simply protect ecological systems but simultaneously extracts livelihoods, access, and situated forms of knowledge. Focusing on the Danube Delta as a critical zone, the project examines how zoning regimes, permit systems, and remote modes of control reorganize relations between communities and their environment. Within the condition of the natural reserve, it asks what it means to live under continuous preservation and how governance might be rearticulated for those who inhabit and negotiate its limits. In this context, diplomacy is reframed not as an external institutional protocol, but as a situated spatial practice emerging from the tensions between regulation and lived experience.

Informed by Giorgio Agamben’s concept of profanation, the project is structured as a trilogy of inquiry across territorial scales, the wider territory, the village and lake system, and the city. Across these interconnected conditions, it traces how ecological processes, governance frameworks, and everyday practices are deeply entangled, revealing environmental governance as an extractive mechanism that translates lived knowledge into remote systems of control.

At its core, the project seeks to make the local practice of fishing operative in subverting the hegemonic technopolitical mechanisms through which the Delta is understood, negotiated, and managed. In response, it proposes a series of infrastructural “acupunctures” that render local agency legible within the territorial system. Through a simultaneous process of formalisation and informalisation, fishing practices are re-inscribed into governance through the construction of a fishing dock and the adaptive reuse of a former fish canning factory, while environmental data is relocated into the commons of the Delta, opening monitoring processes to collective participation and situated knowledge production.

The project is liminal methaphorically existing at the threshold between needed action and an anticipated vision, but also physically situated between systems of power. Working simultaneously through territory, community and material, the interventions do not merely represent the citizen, the village or the institution. Instead, they position these actors on a shared and horizontal plane, displacing top-down forms of control in favour of governance emerging from below. The highly sophisticated and the deeply analogue, the abstract and the material, are brought into proximity not as opposites, but as coexisting forms of inhabitation and knowledge production. Through this profanation of established hierarchies, the project reclaims agency for those rendered outsiders within their own land.