PASSEPARTOUT 40

22. årgang · 2020 · 288 sider

Organization, or the ways in which art connects to its social and political surroundings, is increasingly becoming a focus of attention in the contemporary art field. Prompted by a situation in which contemporary art is simultaneously handled as a touristic device, as a value in creative economies, as a means for creating amiable socialities or as space and moment for critical reflection on social as well as personal issues, art practices and curatorial initiatives have, in recent years, placed the organizing process itself at the very center of their efforts. Thereby the term ‘infrastructure’ has become an intensely discussed issue as it is a central place for those repositionings: a very much hidden mode of operation that has only now started coming to the surface. 

Infrastructure is concerned with connecting people and things, and thus constructing a common world. However, while enabling connections, infrastructure simultaneously shapes these connections, in the sense of an often hidden “protocol” (Rogoff, 2013). Thereby, infrastructure allows some ideas to become valuable and some forms of life to exist, while precluding others. As the American anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli argues, infrastructures are belated events. They can be grasped only from their tailings—or from the effect they leave behind (Povinelli, The Infrastructure Summit, Bergen, 2016). Similarly, urban theorist Keller Easterling describes infrastructure space as the “undeclared but consequential activities” of an organization, not the text but the constantly updating software that manages the text (Easterling, 2014, p. 23). Therefore it seems comprehensible that organizational issues—the infrastructural—are, as in this publication, theorized not as explicit sovereign powers, but rather as discrete operations, looking at the ways through which juridical, spatial or logistical systems are managed and coordinated. 

Responding to this, recently emerged approaches to infrastructure and organizing in the arts and critical cultural studies have attempted to redefine the meaning of practices engaging with the parameters they are interwoven with and surrounded by as critical or even radical action. Such practices even become platforms for collective, cross-disciplinary inquiries and for art and social action to merge as crucial sites of experimentation between embodied experience, social struggle, and collective appropriations of space. Increasingly, art museums and other more or less institutionalized art spaces become framed as scenes for public assemblies, social gatherings, and participatory commitments. The adaption of “activist” strategies and co-creative practices into highly institutionalized settings is a signal of this. Irit Rogoff’s statement on the curatorial is therefore valid for those practices as well: the curatorial, she claims, has the capacity of bringing together “the necessary links between collectivity, infrastructure and contemporaneity [by] working simultaneously in several modalities, kidnapping knowledges and sensibilities and insights and melding them into an instantiation of our contemporary conditions.” (Rogoff, 2015, p. 48) It is precisely this contested and performative nature of the concept of infrastructure which this issue aims to seize upon and explore further. When considered a performative enactment, the concept of infrastructure may work as a tool to make clear what’s at stake in radical forms of organization, practices of commoning, or in curatorial experiments in the art system. Performative, then, not only means to consider the infrastructural as something fluid and constantly changing, but also as something malleable, which those living and acting within can shape. So one of the major interests in the texts gathered in this issue is the search for moments where these kinds of action are manifested and the tracing of all the different modes in which the actors themselves use or engage with their infrastructural environment for much more than just acting within it.

This issue on New Infrastructures sets out to map an emerging field of experimental infrastructures in the art field. As an interdisciplinary endeavor it includes perspectives, tactics and attitudes by artists and curators, as well as from the fields of geography, architecture, anthropology and organizational theory. It gathers theoretical as well as practice-based perspectives and close readings of case studies. Thereby the contributions trace all kinds of different negotiations between the involved stakeholders, pointing to all those moments where it is possible to shape and reconfigure infrastructural parameters instead of understanding them only as limits. 

Passepartout #40: New Infrastructures kan desuden tilgås digitalt her: https://tidsskrift.dk/passepartout/issue/view/8893