matt lambert earns doctorate after successful dissertation defense

matt lambert explores how craft can be used as a tool for questioning power, supporting decolonization, and challenging traditional academic structures. They draws on La Paperson’s idea of the scyborg – a person who takes technologies created under colonial systems and repurposes them for decolonizing work.

Working with many different artists and institutions can help reshape cultural ideas about queerness and the body, and can break down the limits that academia places on craft. By looking closely at the harmful systems and histories within cultural institutions, lambert argues that we need new ways to disrupt them.

Inspired by Natalie Loveless’s concept of polydisciplinamory—a way of mixing making, writing, collaborating, and curating – lambert promotes methods that create dialogue with, rather than about, marginalized bodies. Joy and pleasure are seen as essential in imagining new and more just ways for institutions to exist.

Supervisors were Rebecca Hilton Katja Aglert and Stacey Sacks. The opponent was Martin Hargreaves. The examination committee consisted of Anette Göthlund, Daniel Fountain and Imri Sandström. The chair of the defense was Mathew Gregory.

Dissertation abstract and documentation

Dissertation components

matt lambert is a non-binary, trans, multidisciplinary collaborator and co-conspirator working towards equity, inclusion, and reparation. Their practice is based in polydisciplinamory, entangling making, writing, curating, collaborating, and performing. lambert currently is based in Stockholm, Sweden and was born in Detroit MI, US, where they still maintain a studio.

www.mattlambertstudio.com