This thesis engages a ‘poetics of representation’ of socio-culturally signifying uses of material(ized) elements within ‘London’, Ontario. My model of representational meaning combines Hall’s (1997) representational diagramming, and Hjelmslev’s glossematics, via Deleuze and Guattari (1987). I claim a theoretical primacy of intersubjectivity, using Lefebvre’s (1991) idea of trialectical space; de Certeau’s idea of ‘Concept-city’/‘operational city’ is applied to social-scientific research in ‘London’. I treat local artist Jack Chambers’s work (especially his film The Hart of London) as an ‘everyday’ representational poetics, linking the local and universal, while illustrating how one’s representational poetics may develop, viz., experience. I articulate this analysis, viz., theories of found footage films, to interrogate the materiality of the subject-matter of Chambers’s work. My analysis shifts within this local scope to ultimately problematize the colonial-capitalist model of space and locality (especially placenames) through a decolonizing analysis of the land-language nexus of Deshkan Ziibing (a.k.a., the ‘Thames River’)
