With infrastructure something both huge and hidden is conjured up, a dark and indistinct shadow of a thing, that imperatively needs to function for it not to be thought about. Conceptually always beneath structure, below architecture, under life as we know it, the infra is lower in position, in value, it is spatially further, and always to be discussed later. With such a subservient status infrastructure is what allows a society to hold its shape –its structure– as a complex set of material forms that produce a (more or less) stable pattern. Infrastructure, unlike technology, is made of objects that create the ground on which other objects can operate as systems. Infrastructure is the physical networks through which ideas and waste, power and persons, and economy are trafficked, and the pattern they form consists of actions, not things, as the universe is constantly moving, and therefore infrastructure needs to re-generate, to evolve, to contain, to transport, to transfer, to guide and generally to move things along.

Infrastructure is often confused with public works, and the local government departments responsible for the planning and maintenance of the practical aspects of services and utilities. And yet it is –as if often the case– precisely within its subordinate function, of how it is being imagined and constructed, that it becomes the repository for political and cultural imagination, the network for social, and economic connections, and that it outlines the form of human and more-than-human ecologies. It is often difficult to grasp what infrastructure actually is because of its dual nature: both made of material things and also of the relation between them. The things it is made of are present (in the city, in the landscape, in the home), and yet are also displaced by matter that they move around. Infrastructure displays a society’s inherent ideologies, and the conditions that allow or restrict what appears in the domain of the visible (which does not only designate images, but that which is intelligible). We concentrate on the computer, not the cable or the data centre; we see the light, not the electricity or the power station; we seek the water coming out of the tap, and ignore the pipes and sewers that bring it there. 

Friedrich Kittler uses the dumbwaiter that Thomas Jefferson, bibliophile and founder of the University of Virginia installed in his dining room, to describe how “infrastructure is what repeats. The dumbwaiter, bound to slave labour, carries bottle after bottle up to Jefferson’s dining room. Its systemic properties tend to become visible only when the repetitions cease. If the wine ceases to appear, at some level and only for an instant, the entire apparatus of slavery comes into view. When you turn on the faucet and water does not flow, the entire water system leaps into the cognitive field.” Systems of domination, subjection or repression also take place in the infrastructural, so that it is not simply a manifestation or the embodiment of pre-existing systems but an intrinsic part of their configuration. In this way infrastructure is a symbol of stability and also a set of ideas about modernity, it is a channeller of flows, a collection of built objects, and yet mostly consists of partial objects and incomplete things, forever constituting material and ideological realities. The way that we understand it today took shape in the Enlightement, as part of a world in movement shaped by and for the free circulation of goods, ideas, money and people, all of which created the idea of progress. This is how the provision of infrastructure and it being a symbol of permanence are so intimately entangled in the sense of shaping “modern” society and realising its future, and this is also how it breaks away at our perception of functional democracies as it itself is breaking down. “Broken infrastructure is loquatious” as Marina Vishmidt says.

What is interesting is the long history of the repression of infrastructure –from architectural drawings for instance. The city of modernity was designed to create and maintain the illusion that infrastructure was a utility to be placed out of sight and separated from the landscapes of our everyday lives. The analysis of the built environment is always to show the complicity with all the supplementary machines, mechanisms, infrastructures; yet buildings and objects always re-emerge as autonomous: we do not like admitting that things have conditions. Left out of the plan, infrastructure was selectively edited out of the new urban utopia, so that the new residential landscape could resemble a tranquil place for the full capitalist development of the modern individual. In the process we forgot about it, and that it needed to be maintained, updated, funded, but also that it was within infrastructure that societies articulate their political imagination, and guide how they want to live in their cities, in their societies, or as Buckminster Fuller would have it, on spaceship earth.

To speak from infrastructure is to speak from the supporting conditions of things, and it is also to speak from a position of complicity, of maintenance, of shared inhabitation. When we turn away from the autonomy of the artwork or the institution toward the systems that allow them to function, we begin to address what has been systematically excluded: bodies that are tired or cold, objects that are broken or contingent, relationships that falter, funding systems that disappear, political systems that break, contexts that shift.

What could this mean for cultural workers and artists everywhere? We could do a lot worse than to follow Marina Vishmidt’s proposed shift from institutional critique to infrastructural critique, as 

the move from the institution as a site for ‘false totalizations’ to an engagement with the thoroughly intertwined objective (historical, socio-economic) and subjective (including affect and artistic subjectivisation) conditions necessary for the institution—and its critique—to exist, reproduce themselves, and posit themselves as both an immanent horizon and a transcendental condition. These conditions include local and global labour markets, corporate power, and property development, inasmuch as they manifest the structural violence of capitalism, racism, and gender—so often mediated by the reckless expansionism of art markets and spaces.

While this acknowledges institutional critique’s legacy it also re-proposes a new-found relevance for it, in face of the current multiple crisis. 

Infrastructure is not simply what supports life—it structures whose lives are supported and whose are not, it contains technologies of governance, of difference, and imagination. When we shift from using the term infrastructure as central in engineering or planning, to one which is crucial in social, cultural and artistic vocabularies, then infrastructure is no longer the unspoken backstage of political life, but a shared terrain of contestation and possibility. The same could be said of how exhibitions function. Display, as any type of infrastructure, is often seen as supplementary—framing rather than forming—and yet it is constitutive of the experience of art. I forever return to Scarpa’s backgrounds or Bo Bardi’s glass easels, not as neutral containers but as spatial propositions: they tell you how to be with an object, with art, with culture, how to encounter it, how to read it. They propose relations. And relations are not innocent.

Multiple infrastructures are also sites of refusal: of precarity, of invisibility, of speed, so that they become the ground not only of survival but of solidarity. This opens the way for an infrastructural imagination that is collective, reflexive, and reparative, which challenges the modernist fantasy of infrastructure as smooth, continuous and silent, and instead foregrounds its noise—its failures, its labour, its politics. When infrastructure enters discourse as a generative figure rather than an exhausted one, it ceases to be the hidden supplement to become the explicit site of cultural work. Can we begin to speak of infrastructural aesthetics—concerned with latency, pressure, friction, and support? Or infrastructural ethics—attuned to the responsibilities of care, maintenance, and interdependence? Infrastructure as not only what gets sometimes and hopefully repaired when it fails, but what is continuously reconfigured in order to keep things liveable.

As infrastructures are increasingly dismantled—through neglect, extraction, privatisation, and technocratic or geo-engineering substitutions—it is entire systems of provision that are effectively dispossessed, but inevitably also the very conditions that sustain collective life. This unmaking is not incidental but systemic, and it is a process that replaces shared structures of support with mechanisms of exclusion, enclosure, and control. The task of imagining otherwise may no longer lie in foreseeing infrastructures yet to come, but in staying with their undoing and attending to what remains: to the acts of maintenance, inhabitation, and interruption that seek to prop up forms of life as they are continuously eroded.

An earlier, and shorter, version of this text appeared in Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems, edited by Hélène Frichot, Adrià Carbonell, Hannes Frykholm, and Sepideh Karami (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2022).