Material Costs — karimaweinman

MATERIAL COSTSPhysicalizing Migration Fatality and Disappearance Data through Terrazzo

Tools: HTML, CSS, JS, Rhino, Adobe Suite, 3D Printing, Plaster Casting

This thesis investigates how migration fatality and disappearance data can be reinterpreted through material craft to create a more reflective encounter with information. Working with the Missing Migrants Project's dataset, this project asks how design can communicate dimensions of human loss that conventional data visualization cannot reach.

The work situates contemporary border violence within a longer colonial history, arguing that the logics of surveillance and quantification that structured European imperial expansion persist in the databases that govern mobility in the Mediterranean today.

Terrazzo is a 15th-century Venetian flooring technique built from discarded fragments bound together into a unified surface. This architectural approach serves as both a material methodology and a conceptual framework.

The act of gathering broken fragments together mirrors how individual journeys are aggregated to form a greater collective narrative. Using terrazzo embeds the project physically into the geography that produced the data.

The Central Mediterranean Migration Route is the deadliest in the world, with over 26,000 deaths and disappearances recorded in the last eleven years.

In the exhibition that accompanies this thesis, each fragment within the terrazzo tiles represents one of those people, with three, four, and five-sided shapes representing children, women, and men, respectively. Hue encodes the cause of death, with terracotta signifying drowning, which accounts for the majority of recorded fatalities.