The Infrastructural Turn? Alternative Infrastuctural Imaginaries of/through art and curatorial practices
For this session we borrow the words of thinker, writer, and activist Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024) from 2017 and ask: “What would it mean to move from the practices and theories of institutional critique in the arts and expand these ideas into an infrastructural critique of the present?”
The “infrastructural turn” in the field of art is, at least, a generative movement towards systemic critiques and propositional thinking addressing major challenges such as the rampant financialisation of the economy and runaway climate change (Baroni, 2017). Infrastructure can be understood as the large-scale technical systems that facilitate the movement, circulation, and provision of people, energy, water, waste, information such as the trainline network and fibre-optic cables under the sea which supply our connection to the internet. Infrastructural studies examine how life is conditioned by such infrastructures, how their effects, social, relations, and politics are central to social reproduction. This panel is not concerned with visual representations of infrastructure or an art history of infrastructure but, rather, we want to explore how artists, curators, and art historians have sought to critique infrastructures, intervene in them, and imagine alternative infrastructures.
Papers on this panel consider what happens after the so-called infrastructural turn in art and curatorial theory and practice, and what is at stake when foregrounding the promises, repetitions of possibility, and power of infrastructures as a site or scene of public making.
Session Convenors:
Claire Louise Staunton, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art/Teesside University
Tom Clark, Manchester School of Art – Manchester Metropolitan University
Speakers:
Giulia Morale, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute for Art History / Courtauld Institute of Art
Beyond Suez: Italy at the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries
In July 1955 Gamal Abdel Nasser, the new President of Egypt, inaugurated the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries to coincide with the third anniversary of the Egyptian Revolution. Since its inception, the Biennale gathered artists from both the northern Mediterranean (Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia and Greece) as well as its southern shores (Algeria, Morocco and Lebanon), crystallising Egypt’s own shifting attitudes towards the Mediterranean region (Ramadan, 2016). This paper zooms into Italy’s participation to the Biennale between 1955 and the early 1960s and interrogates how Italo-Egyptian relations were displayed in this context. Within this framework, the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, and its global implications, often known as the ‘Suez Crisis’, does not only constitute the background against which the Biennale took place. Indeed, the Canal, as a symbol of Egypt’s revolutionary ambitions, shaped the event in the years following 1956 for Egyptian artists and their Mediterranean counterparts alike. This paper examines how Italian and Egyptian artists at the Alexandria Biennale negotiated, and often challenged, geopolitical tensions around the Canal. Ultimately, whereas Egypt was materially at war with a Euro-American coalition over Suez, events such as the Alexandria Biennale constituted an arena to reconfigure the Mediterranean as a region of encounter between North and South. While not immune to Mediterraneanist tropes, the Biennale resisted a commonplace construction of the modern Mediterranean as politically and discursively divided though infrastructurally united, especially in terms of ensuring maritime trade and circulation of commodities and, in turn, the survival of global capitalism.
Iain Campbell, University of Edinburgh
‘Divisiveness is being weakened by technology’: John Cage and the electrical infrastructure
From early in his career the composer John Cage saw electricity as key to the future of music, with electrical instruments promising access to the ‘entire field of sound’. Later, as he expanded his musical concerns to a wider artistic and social field, Cage would often celebrate public utilities, and in particular the electrical grid, which for Cage facilitated an unprecedented and unconstrained connectedness between people. On a foundation of public utilities, Cage saw the possibility for an anarchistic shared individuality, freed from other kinds of social ordering: a potential global anarchist community ‘disorganized by electrical means’.
This paper evaluates Cage’s understanding of the electrical grid and considers challenges to and complications of his figuring of the electrical infrastructure as a neutral energetic ground for free activity, including through a shift in Cage’s own work. It does this through analysis of works by Cage that required the development of electrical systems for performance. Examining, first, the high-tech Variations VII (1966), developed in collaboration with engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and, second, the simpler, DIY amplification of ‘found’ plant materials in Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976), I argue that a shift in Cage’s attitude to infrastructure can be discerned. Away from a seemingly uncritical embrace of infrastructure, Cage can be seen to move towards an exploration of a more partial, fragile, and resistant set of mediations between energetic, technological, ecological, informational, social, and aesthetic domains, suggesting an attempt to stand against the infrastructures that nevertheless condition the works.
Chelsea Haines, Arizona State University
Drinking from the Sea
In an era of climate emergency, water is becoming the new oil. This presentation explores my curatorial collaboration with artist Tali Keren on a film that examines global entanglements of water infrastructure and border (in)security by tracking the development of a proposed US $5.5 billion seawater desalination plant along the Gulf of California, tracing the intended water pipeline from Mexico to Arizona and drawing out interconnected issues of ocean and desert ecologies, United States-Mexico-Middle East entanglements, and tribal water rights. Titled Water/Power, the film investigates how this pipeline initiative—led by Israeli company IDE—intersects with broader histories of conquest linking the Sonoran Desert U.S.-Mexico borderlands to the Middle East. It builds on Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”—the often invisible environmental catastrophes that disproportionately affect the poor—and the necropolitics of the borderlands to reveal how supposedly neutral systems, such as water management, not only mirror but amplify existing inequalities. It calls attention to transformations in maritime ecologies brought about by human intervention, as well as the increasingly dependent relationship and imaginary between the sea and the desert, as desalinated water becomes a more urgently proposed solution to areas facing water scarcity. The film illuminates complex networks of power shaping water access across regions and proposes new imaginaries for equitable water futures. For the presentation at AAH, I plan to show excerpts of the film in development and discuss the process of researching and exhibiting a film that reimagines entangled networks of water infrastructure impacting desert borderlands.
Rebecca Smith, Liverpool School of Art and Design, Liverpool John Moores University and Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University
Infrastructural Mediators: The Role of Fiction-Making in Contemporary Art and its Impact on Digital Infrastructure
The paper employs Shannon Mattern’s concept of infrastructure (2014) and uses this to demonstrate how Western infrastructures and systems of reality frame information. This analysis situates methods of fiction-making as a vital part of infrastructure that enforces borders and the nation state, and supports institutions of power, specifically those of language, finance, and the museum and archive.
Infrastructures become mediators, as relatives of ritual, with the ability to mediate between communities; infrastructures are sites for communication, users and ideas. These infrastructures become intersecting platforms that support ‘intellectual and material systems and labour practices [that] are mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing’ (Mattern 2014: para. 2). Media and information within an infrastructure becomes media as potentially embodied on an urban or global scale (Mattern 2017:xxv) ‘as a force whose modes, ideologies, and aesthetics can be spatialized, and materialized, in the landscape.’ (Mattern 2017: xxvi) These intersecting infrastructures shape the planet’s ecology and organisation but are often unseen. This is why it is important to understand the methods of fiction-making as a vital aspect of Western infrastructure to reveal how Western realities are sustained and structured.
This paper utilises capital and technological infrastructures to demonstrate how fiction-making can sustain Western realities. Contemporary art can exploit these fiction-making strategies employed by structures of power to readdress the inequalities within cultural knowledge, memory and oppression/suppression. This paper will examine the work of Maud Craigie, Chloé Galibert-Laîne and Ben Evans James as case studies to examine these strategies and provide methods that challenge these infrastructures.