COST

Material Refusals: Rhizomes, Actants, and the Colonial Residue of Wool Monica Perez Introduction: Unresolved Histories

COST is an ongoing project by Monica Perez that investigates the colonial and capitalist histories embedded in material, form, and memory. Focused on the entangled relationship between England and Uruguay, the work examines how systems of extraction have shaped landscapes and lives across continents, generations, and economies.

In England, beginning in the late 15th century, the countryside underwent significant changes. Land that had once been shared—used communally for grazing animals or growing food—was gradually fenced off and privatized. This process, known as enclosure, displaced many rural families from the land, disrupting older ways of living and working. Farming shifted too: small, diverse plots gave way to large-scale operations focused on raising sheep for wool, grown not to feed local communities but to generate profit abroad. By 1888, British designer and political thinker William Morris reflected on these changes, writing:

“It was more profitable to raise wool for the foreign market than grain for home consumption— sheep were more profitable animals than men.”

These domestic changes set the stage for imperial expansion. By the early 19th century, Uruguay’s vast grasslands—the Pampas—had been converted into sheep pastures to serve British industry. Wool arrived in England stripped of context, rendered clean and familiar. Yet it carried with it the weight of loss-the erasure of lives, lands, and histories that made its production possible. Indigenous communities, especially the Charrúa, were displaced or exterminated, later written out of national memory through silence and myth.

COST asks how distant demands transformed both rural England and colonial South America. It resists simplified narratives, confronting contradiction, shifting power, and the often-overlooked strategies of survival embedded in these histories. What does it mean to make work about what cannot be spoken, named, or resolved? COST, as both painting and method of inquiry, begins with this question. It threads together colonial violence, material extraction, and systemic erasure—not by illustrating these forces but by holding them in form, texture, and weight.

The inquiry began with a question rooted in both research and inheritance: What was England’s role in Uruguay—my country of origin—during its imperial expansion? I was curious about who was watching when the Charrúa were massacred in 1831—lured into a false peace meeting by Uruguay’s first president and then slaughtered to clear land for wool production. Standing just across the water, British naval officer Thomas Cochrane was securing Atlantic trade routes for the Empire. His presence didn’t cause the massacre, but it enabled the conditions under which it could unfold—silently underwriting the violence from the shoreline. Today, he lies buried in Westminster Abbey; the Charrúa remain largely absent from national memory.

As someone descended from Indigenous ancestors whose histories were erased or denied, this question wasn’t abstract. It was personal. Living and working in England made the investigation more urgent; I was moving through the very landscapes that had once set colonial systems in motion. That research led me to wool: a seemingly benign material that quietly linked land, livestock, and labor to systems of profit, displacement, and control.

In COST, matter is not passive. These are not traditional paintings but expanded forms—built through accumulation, pressure, and refusal. They begin on the floor, but reach into structure, becoming thresholds. Wool, wax, canvas, and wood are not just materials but witnesses. Each carries a charge: British wool spun from a history of enclosure, eucalyptus wood brought from Uruguay, mudlarked fragments of the Thames, Salisbury chalk, oil, pigment, hair, clay, char. These paintings are shaped as much by foraging, staining, and layering as they are by traditional mark-making. They are not representations but participants.

As theorist Karen Barad writes: “Matter is not a thing, but a doing.”

This paper follows that logic, drawing from rhizomatic theory, Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and postcolonial material histories to explore how material form—through structure, surface, and repetition—can disrupt inherited narratives and offer new ways of standing with the past.

Material as Witness / Material as Weapon

In the early stages of the project, I found myself attacking the canvas—scraping, cracking, puncturing. Not delicately, but with embodied anger. The gesture became a form of confrontation: with history, with memory, with silence. Wool, in particular, became a central focus. A material often associated with softness, domesticity, and care—but here, reactivated as something political, something violent.

In Uruguay, wool marked the country’s transformation into a node of British imperial capitalism. It connected sheep to land, land to violence, and violence to erasure. In COST, wool is not just a material but an actant—a term from Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that refers to a nonhuman force with agency. Each fiber holds the residue of cleared grasslands, the legacy of Indigenous displacement, and the national whitening campaigns. Each strand participates in a larger network of bodies, histories, and trades.

Other materials echo this layered charge. Wax seals and obscures. Bogwood holds waterlogged time. Clay crumbles. Chalk stains—marking time through twelve hours of listening to my drumming. A private ceremony. A way of staying with the body, of listening through repetition. These are not decorative additions but sedimented traces—each one holding memory in tension. The paintings witness. They absorb. They push back.

Colonial Entanglements and the Archive

To understand these material entanglements, I had to look back. Spanish colonization of the Río de la Plata began in the early 16th century, with Montevideo formally founded in 1726 as a military outpost. By the late 18th century, French interest in the region grew—through scientific expeditions, botanical mapping, and the quiet transfer of textile knowledge. British involvement came next, in a more aggressive form: two failed invasions in 1806 and 1807 were followed not by retreat, but by economic infiltration. Banks, shipping routes, and wool contracts replaced armies. Empire shifted form, not intent.

This network of colonial actors—Spain, France, and Britain—utilized wool as both a raw material and an imperial currency. It linked Indigenous lands, enslaved or displaced people, and nonhuman animals into layered systems of extraction. The actor network around wool was never singular: it included governments, naval fleets, sheep, grasslands, textile mills, shipping ports, scientific institutions, and now, paintings like COST. These agents were not arranged in a clear hierarchy. They operated like a rhizome: moving laterally, reinforcing one another, shaping desire, classification, and memory.

The painting titled COST.1831 references the Salsipuedes Massacre when Uruguay’s first president lured Charrúa leaders into a peace meeting and had them slaughtered. This was not an isolated act of betrayal. It was infrastructural: clearing land for sheep, making Uruguay legible to the empire. At the same time, British naval forces—led by figures like Cochrane—were securing Atlantic trade routes, ensuring that wool could move freely while lives were erased without a record. In COST.89%, a white-painted form hides a black underside, referencing Uruguay’s whitening policies and the census statistic that 89% of the population now identifies as white. COST.1:1 draws a false equivalence between the weight of a black sheep and a human body, exposing the imperial logic that recorded livestock in detail while rendering human lives absent. These are not illustrations. They are refusals—painted disruptions of a colonial archive that prefers silence.

Rhizomes, Nodes, Refusals

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome offers a counter to linear, hierarchical history. Rhizomes grow sideways. They spread without a central root. Any point can connect to any other. COST takes up this logic. The paintings do not unfold in sequence; they are not explanatory. They function as nodes—affective, material, unstable. Each one refuses containment, opting instead for accumulation, fracture, and slippage.

This is also a kind of refusal: not to explain, not to resolve, not to conform to the logic of the archive. The paintings do not offer closure. They do not translate. Each title—a year, a weight, a percentage—marks absence. Data as scar. An index of what was taken, erased, or never counted.

Artist Huma Bhabha’s 2022 lecture at the Hammer Museum offers a resonant parallel. Her embrace of the unfinished, the raw, and the decayed resists traditional sculptural finality. Her figures—“actors so ancient they become science fiction”—exist in states of reassembly, imagined ritual, and cinematic narrative. That sensibility echoes through COST: mark-making as memory, painting as actor, the wall or plinth as a spectral stage. Like Bhabha’s work, COST does not reconstruct the past—it haunts it.

Where might the work go next?

Lately, I’ve found myself returning to painting—not as a departure from the existing works but as a way to echo their process. To stage the forms. As if they were part of a scene, a stage, a score. The floor remains the starting point. The surface becomes a membrane—something to be breached, thickened, or collapsed. What if the two-dimensional plane could hold as much tension as mass? What if gesture alone could carry the weight of structure?

I’m interested in the oscillation between surface and form, in letting pigment hover and soak, and in seeing what resists the frame. Paintings that lean, slump, crust over. That refuses to resolve. This isn’t about transition—it’s about re-entry—a return to trace, to mark, to echo. The plinth becomes a landscape that reverberates the body’s gestures—a site of accumulation rather than display. In this pursuit, painting becomes another actant. Not background, not support, but a force in the network—joining wool, chalk, hair, canvas, and memory in a structure that won’t hold still.

Conclusion: Standing With the Work

COST is not a monument. It does not offer closure. It does not require complete understanding. Instead, it insists on being stood with. These are not reconstructions; they are reckonings. Rhizomatic, ruptured, and persistently unresolved, the paintings in COST become thresholds— holding space for what was meant to be forgotten.

Wool is not the entirety of the archive. It is one thread in a larger tangle of extraction—woven through sugar, cattle, coffee, and bodies. The work does not illustrate history; it unsettles it. It asks to be felt, not decoded. To be witnessed, not explained. What possibilities emerge when we acknowledge what has been omitted? When do we allow absence to shape the form? COST does not attempt to resolve the past but to stay with it. To imagine futures built not on erasure but on reciprocity, resistance, and repair.

As Eduardo Galeano writes:

“We are what we remember, and the less we remember, the less we are.”

In COST, memory is not nostalgia—it’s material. The paintings insist on remembrance through gesture, texture, and absence. They hold the weight of what was erased, refusing silence even when the archive has nothing to say.

Thanks for reading.

“COST marks the culmination of my time in the Painting MA at the Royal College of Art (2025). I’ll continue building on this project as the year unfolds. If you’d like to see more, visit my website: monica-perez.com.”