Abstract Current approaches to ecological and territorial crisis often fail to explain how material transformations become socially perceptible and actionable, particularly across interconnected human and more-than-human systems. This paper addresses this gap by proposing territorial semiosis as a framework for analysing how changes in material conditions are interpreted, contested, and reorganised within situated socioecological contexts. The study draws on a six-year investigation (2018–2024) in Moita Redonda (Ceará, Brazil), a traditional ceramic community affected by the scarcity of red toá clay. It combines long-term field immersion, environmental microbiology, experimental work with autochthonous microbial consortia, and the development of design-mediated translation devices, including clay filters, participatory mapping, and a community catalogue. The results show that pigment stability loss is linked to a misalignment among physicochemical conditions, microbial dynamics, and territorial governance. Experimental assays demonstrate that locally available clays retain microbial capacities for iron mobilisation under specific conditions, while design interventions make these processes perceptible and actionable at domestic and community scales. At the same time, cartographic and narrative devices reveal how restricted access to raw materials and territorial fragmentation constrain the adoption of technical alternatives. The paper argues that regeneration should not be understood as the recovery of a previous material state, but as the recomposition of the conditions that enable coordinated interpretation and response. In this sense, territorial semiosis is advanced as a methodological contribution for tracing transformations across scales and for supporting situated interventions in complex socioecological systems.
Viana et al. (Fri,) studied this question.