Solveig Qu Suess is an artist and researcher working across documentary cinema, infrastructure studies, feminist media, and postcolonial techno-politics. Her research focuses on the politics of infrastructure, energy transition, and environmental mediation, with a regional focus on China, Southeast Asia, and transnational corridors of development. She is currently a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at the University of Basel. 

Her doctoral project, Holding Rivers, Becoming Mountains, examines the temporal and political conflicts produced by Southeast Asia’s energy transition and its changing riverine infrastructures across the Mekong basin. Based on documentary video and fieldwork in Laos, Thailand, and Yunnan, the project investigates how energy infrastructures are enmeshed with visual regimes, technical expertise, and environmental imaginaries that shape whose knowledge, measurements, and temporalities come to count in the negotiation of riverine futures across unequal technical, political, and lived worlds.

Her artistic and research projects have been presented internationally. She was Artist-in-Residence and Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU Shanghai from 2024 to 2025, and a visiting scholar at the Center for Global Asia, NYU Shanghai, through the SNSF Doc.Mobility grant from 2025 to 2026. From 2020 to 2024, she was a Junior Researcher on the SNSF project Environmental Fix at the Critical Media Lab, FHNW Academy of Art and Design. In 2017, she graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where her research examined how the calculation and management of weather and environments became central to the formation of supply-chain capitalism, with a case study on the transcontinental Belt and Road Initiative across desert spaces in Western China.

• infrastructure studies
• visual ethnography
• environmental humanities
• feminist science and technology studies
• visual culture