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15-16 May, Infrastructural memory: cultures of ecology and collapse

Infrastructural memory

Infrastructure is commonly defined as the essential support that enables a system to function. This workshop, however, shifts the focus to consider what happens when infrastructure collapses, becomes obsolete or is destroyed. How might closer attention to infrastructural decline deepen our understanding of infrastructure not simply as something to celebrate or uphold, but as something marked by absence and interruption? Central to our conversations will be the role of memory in shaping and giving form to infrastructure.

In the humanities, memory has come to be understood mainly as interhuman communication, taking such forms as testimonies or oral history reports. How can the concept of memory be expanded to encompass infrastructural support? Can (derelict) infrastructure itself become a site of memory? If landscapes are sites of memory where history has already happened, what do landscapes and their shaping by infrastructure by human and more-than-human interactions remember? How does infrastructure serve the purpose of multidirectional remembering? In an era of climate catastrophe, how should we remember the extractive infrastructures that have shaped our present crisis? How do colonial logics of racialised dispossession endure into the present, either encoded in infrastructure or enabled by its absence? How do infrastructures exist as palimpsests, layered with conflicting memories and aspirations? Finally, as infrastructures decay, how can they be redeemed, repurposed or invested with new meanings?

This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to examine infrastructures as sites of absence and interruption, framing these discussions through the lens of memory. Drawing on the ‘infrastructural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (Johnson and Nemser 2022), participants will engage with the many temporalities of infrastructure, moving beyond its conventional association with space. Of particular interest is ‘the aesthetic life of infrastructure’ (Rich et al. 2023), with our speakers exploring how infrastructure performs, is represented in culture or can be analysed in terms of affect, symbolism and embodiment.

 

 

Dates: 15-16 May, 2025

Venue: Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Maria-Theresia-Str. 21, 81675 Munich

Convened by Shane Boyle (Queen Mary University of London) and Gerald Siegmund (Justus-Liebig University Giessen)

Please register here by 7 May. You can find the program here.