Antonia FRIEDMAN

Antonia Majaca Friedman is a researcher and theorist whose work develops at the intersection of political epistemology, critical environmental theory, and decolonial feminist thought. Her research proceeds from the recognition that planetary breakdown cannot be adequately addressed without confronting the material, historical, epistemological and ideological formations that render the Earth computable. Majaca is the editor of Incomputable Earth: Technology and the Anthropocene Hypothesis (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) which argues that the Anthropocene hypothesis functions less as geological designation than as ideological apparatus—diagnosing planetary crisis while legitimating technological intensification as its remedy—and proposes counterhegemonic political epistemologies grounded in feminist, decolonial, and historical materialist thought.

Her recent theoretical writing advances these concerns through distinct interventions. "The Oikos of the Earth, the Nomos of the Black Hole" (e-flux journal #143, 2024) reads three paradigmatic techno-scientific objects—the Earthrise photograph, the black hole image, and the Anthropocene hypothesis—as fetish objects of techno-positivist ideology. Drawing on feminist critiques of science and critical engagement with Arendtian notion of the political and Schmitt's nomos, the essay proposes thinking from the perspective of the planetary oikos: not the patriarchal enclosure of ancient economy but the space of earthly labor and reproduction that computational governance must render external yet fundamentally depends on in order to function.

"Mud Epistemology: Gender, Metabolism, and Marx's Unfinished Revolution" (e-flux journal #157, 2025) intervenes in current ecological Marxism debates by returning to Marx's 1881 correspondence with Vera Zasulich. The essay argues that Marx's tortured response registered, a question that condensed everything his earlier work had deferred. Against metabolic rift theory's universalist categories, the essay argues that the gendered division of labor constitutes the ur-separation. Mud epistemology names a way of knowing that emerges through working with unstable substrates, where specific metabolic relations between communities and ecologies generate praxes of being human that resist universalization.

Majaca is currently a doctoral research fellow in the ERC-funded HealthXCross project at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Her research, titled "Metabolic Relations as Social Relations: A Decolonial Feminist Study of Microbial Ecologies and the Remaking of Human and Nature" investigates microbiome technoscience by asking what microbial ecologies reveal about the historical and political constitution of the domains they move between. The research argues that the history of industrial capitalism persists not merely as social context but as material sediment in microbiomes, metabolomes, and genomes: antibiotic resistance genes as traces of pharmaceutical regimes, gut compositions shaped by colonial displacement, epigenetic marks encoding transgenerational exposure. Against the drive to render microbial futures governable through predictive modeling, and against the promissory narratives of microbes in the context of personalised health, the research insists on reading microbes as historical assemblages.

She founded and coordinates the research cluster "Radical Epistemologies: Political Ecology and Transversal Praxis" at NICHE – New Institute for Environmental Humanities, Ca' Foscari. The cluster operates through an experimental "Learning With" workshop series—a methodology of epistemic commoning where conceptual vocabularies accumulate recursively across encounters with scholars, artists, and practitioners.

She held teaching and research positions at Graz University of Technology and the Dutch Art Institute, and was principal investigator of a multi-year Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project—the artistic research initiative from which Incomputable Earth emerged. She has directed research, discursive, exhibition, and publishing projects for Documenta 14, the Berlin Biennale, the Venice Biennale, HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt, DAAD, Dutch Art Institute, and Goldsmiths.

Majaca's earlier research and curatorial work, largely developed in close collaboration with the art historian, theorist, and curator Ivana Bago, engaged in discursive, exhibition, and publishing projects at the intersection of art history, political and cultural theory, and contemporary art production.