Enchanted Matter is a design research studio by Carlos Sabogal García and Alaa Quraishi in Albuquerque, NM. Working across installation, intervention, and spatial storytelling, the studio asks how matter might hold memory, fracture typologies, and open rituals of belonging.

Their ethos is defined by Work, Myth, and Edge: Work insists on the politics of making; Myth disassembles and recomposes typologies into speculative rituals; Edge explores thresholds—disciplinary, geographic, and cultural.

Carlos holds an M.Arch from CCA, where he studied computational design and vernacular intelligence. Alaa earned her M.Arch from MIT, where she investigated spatial storytelling and the agency of mythologies. Their histories— of migration, ritual, and layered belonging— are not background but frameworks. Identity becomes methodology.

Recent projects include DREAMers Portal (2025, PASEO Festival, Taos), a light-based installation reflecting immigrant journeys; DREAMers Menagerie (2024, Rainosek Gallery, Albuquerque), suspended dollhouse bedrooms evoking DACA’s intimacies. In Code & Craft, cast concrete artifacts as experiments in materiality and reconfiguration.

We take play seriously. Play suspends us in a dream-like state, where the familiar is re-presented and perception is re-oriented. Dreams are not escapes but methods of re-seeing, of estranging what is known and returning it anew.

Materials are never neutral. They carry the agency of cultural memory, storing resistance and reflection within their surfaces. An etched pattern—computational, analog, glitched, or repeated—becomes a record of process and fracture. Concrete, string, dichroic film: chosen not for permanence but for how they refract light, register fragility, and remember.

Our practice is research through design. The artifact is never fixed; it remains in flux, a sculptural laboratory where making itself is the experiment. What matters is not mastery but contamination: casting unsettled by algorithms, knotting reframed through repetition, printing and cutting inflected by hand.

Each artifact is both experiment and memory, a site where labor and belonging are inscribed in matter. In this unstable threshold, dream and material, myth and memory, digital and analog, collide and reconfigure.

In Fragments of a Future Mythology Series, we return to the laboratory: thin castings, mirrored fragments, dyed concrete—each piece testing how material research can open new architectures of belonging.