FOR 5710:  Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524611401

Infrastructures ensure the supply of life. This creates not only technological-administrative realities, but complex webs of social and cultural interdependencies. The group assembles researchers from theater studies, literary studies, media studies, and political philosophy to inquire into the specific forms of these interdependencies and into alternative infrastructural practices. Their research is based on a dual concept of infrastructure: as the material basis of coexistence in the form of roads, railways or water pipes and as the implicit formation of perception and action. Conceptually, the focus is on an aspect that has been neglected so far: the aesthetics of infrastructure. Aesthetic criteria prefigure what appears to be desirable and feasible in terms of infrastructure; in doing so, they shape coexistence with and through infrastructures - which in turn determine what can be experienced by whom. In analyzing artistic works and socio-cultural processes from the fields of theater/performance, literature, film and media art, the group aims to expand previous infrastructure research, which is oriented towards questions of technology and administration, to include a perspective that reflects infrastructure as a social ordering force and makes it negotiable. The historic focus is on works, forms, communities and institutions from 1990 to the present that deal with the past and survival of the heavy industrial, colonial, racializing and extractivist infrastructure that was established from the 19th century onwards. The group pursues a transnational approach and focuses in particular on infrastructures in the global peripheries. Thematically, it focuses on the following three areas: (1) the imaginary forces and power dispositions that lead to the establishment, maintenance, repair or even neglect of infrastructure; (2) the sensory perceptual experiences (aisthesis) that are made possible and conditioned by infrastructures, as well as those through which infrastructure itself becomes perceptible; (3) the forms of distributive agency in the use of infrastructures and alternative, bottom-up 'infrastructural' practices. In connection with the aesthetic, on the one hand, the violence of infrastructural dependencies and their ambivalent relationship to the institutional come to the fore; on the other hand, the artistic interventions to be considered here bring into view the emancipatory potential in dealing with infrastructure while inventing and probing new forms of care.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• International Connection: Austria, Brazil, USA

Projects

• Coordination Funds (Applicant Etzold, Jörn )
• TP 1: Hollowed Landscapes. Imaginations of Life in Infrastructures of Extraction (Applicant Etzold, Jörn )
• TP 2: Cinematic Scenes of Infrastructure (Applicants Fahle, Oliver ;  Hasebrink, Felix )
• TP 3: Aesthetic Practices of Attunement as Access to Colonial Infrastructures of Extraction (Applicant Gunkel, Henriette )
• TP 4: Extractivism and Infrastructure in the Brazilian literature (Applicant Amorim Izabel, Tomaz )
• TP 5: Infrastructures of care. Sounds, social editing and cuidadanía (Applicant Lorey, Isabell )
• TP 6: 'Race as Infrastructure' and Literary Infrastructures of Resistance (Applicant Bieger, Laura )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Jörn Etzold