The Research Unit Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply, based at Ruhr University Bochum and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since October 2025. The unit brings together scholars of film, literature, media, political philosophy, and theatre and performance from both institutions, as well as newly recruited researchers from Brazil, Germany, Great Britain, Slovakia, Spain and Zimbabwe. Infrastructures ensure the supply of life in modern societies. In doing so, they determine which experiences are available to whom. However, they are not merely functional but based on imaginations about who should lead what kind of life and who should supply it. The research programme’s leading hypothesis is that aesthetic practices provide access to an understanding of infrastructures by examining the imaginary forces that drive their construction, maintenance, and neglect. They scrutinise the ways in which infrastructures determine what can be sensed by whom, and they experiment with alternative infra-structuring practices. The unit collaborates very closely with artists and art institutions—theatre festivals, museums, and cinemas—in the Ruhr Region and beyond. International academic partners are invited through the Mercator Fellowship Program.
Some members of the unit started exploring the subject of infrastructures with a lecture series in winter 2019/2020. During the process of developing the working programme, some left and others joined, but above all, the problems and questions related to infrastructures have become increasingly pressing. With the age of seamless globalisation being clearly over, the inhabitants of the Earth are forced to recognise that they inhabit one planet with limited surface and resources, connected by fibre optics and electromagnetic waves, but divided by fences and borders. Affluent Western populations are beginning to learn what the rest of the world’s population has known for a long time: infrastructures are fragile and vulnerable. They are not always invisible; sometimes they are overtly visible, overburdened, and dysfunctional.
The research unit employs a dual definition of “infrastructure”. The more common meaning refers to railways, roads and networks that transport and distribute commodities, energy, and water, thereby enabling structures and institutions. However, in recent years, “infrastructure” has also increasingly come to refer to underlying conditions, ways of life, discourses, and institutions, including affects, self-images, habitus, habits, and processes of subjectification. These infrastructures are not immaterial or metaphorical; they have their own materiality and manifest in practices. The two definitions are interrelated: built infrastructures shape the social and affective ones, producing living environments, self-perceptions, emotions, and communities. On the other hand, they are not merely functional but embody what Cornelius Castoriadis calls the ‘social imaginary’. Infrastructures express, without saying a word, which lives should be supported, by whom, and with which resources. They are gendered and racialised, and access to them is distributed in highly unequal ways. Artistic practices can serve as a means not only to ‘represent’ infrastructures, but also to explore how worlds are constituted by them, and to experiment with alternative practices.
The research will focus on three core areas. Firstly, infrastructures are based on imaginations of coexistence. Aesthetic practices can explore these concepts and envision alternative infrastructures. Project 1: Hollowed-Out Landscapes: Imaginations of Life amid Infrastructures of Extraction by Jörn Etzold, Katarína Marková and Jana Kerima Stolzer examines the role of art institutions in areas affected by the trauma of deindustrialisation, such as the Ruhr Region and Slovakia. They imagine other futures, but remain dependent on a persistent economy of extraction, as a comparison with Brazil shows. In Project 2: Cinematic Scenes of Infrastructure, Oliver Fahle, Felix Hasebrink, and Jennifer Wermuth examine scenes in which infrastructures begin to act from historical and contemporary perspectives. Cinema not only depicts infrastructure, but also imagines it.
The second core area addresses the question of aesthesis: how do infrastructures shape what can be sensed and experienced, and by whom? Project 3: Aesthetic Practices of Attunement as Access to Colonial Infrastructures of Extraction, by Henriette Gunkel, Sam Nightingale, and Takudzwa Mukesi, examines artistic practices that commemorate the genocide of the Nama and Herero peoples in Namibia, which was linked to gold extraction. In Project 4: Extractivism and Infrastructure in Brazilian Literature, Tomaz Amorim researches how modernist Brazilian literature created an extractive imagination, contrasting it with the work of contemporary Quilombola and Indigenous writers.
Finally, the core area participation will explore how infrastructures regulate access to society prior to any public negotiation. Isabell Lorey, Sara Jiménez Fernández, and Francesco Salvini (pantxo ramas) will examine Spanish neighbourhoods that are facing excessive gentrification and touristification in Project 5: Infrastructures of Care: Sound, Social Editing and Ciudadanía. In Project 6: Race as Infrastructure and Literary Infrastructures of Resistance, Laura Bieger, Natalie Erkel, and Esther Adeyemo examine literary genres as infrastructures that produce race. Literary genres are not as harmless as they might seem, since they determine social positions.
The scientific coordination of the group is Ruth Schmidt, whose PhD thesis on imaginary infrastructures will be published shortly.
The Research Unit Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply, based at Ruhr University Bochum and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since October 2025. The unit brings together scholars of film, literature, media, political philosophy, and theatre and performance from both institutions, as well as newly recruited researchers from Brazil, Germany, Great Britain, Slovakia, Spain and Zimbabwe. Infrastructures ensure the supply of life in modern societies. In doing so, they determine which experiences are available to whom. However, they are not merely functional but based on imaginations about who should lead what kind of life and who should supply it. The research programme’s leading hypothesis is that aesthetic practices provide access to an understanding of infrastructures by examining the imaginary forces that drive their construction, maintenance, and neglect. They scrutinise the ways in which infrastructures determine what can be sensed by whom, and they experiment with alternative infra-structuring practices. The unit collaborates very closely with artists and art institutions—theatre festivals, museums, and cinemas—in the Ruhr Region and beyond. International academic partners are invited through the Mercator Fellowship Program.
Some members of the unit started exploring the subject of infrastructures with a lecture series in winter 2019/2020. During the process of developing the working programme, some left and others joined, but above all, the problems and questions related to infrastructures have become increasingly pressing. With the age of seamless globalisation being clearly over, the inhabitants of the Earth are forced to recognise that they inhabit one planet with limited surface and resources, connected by fibre optics and electromagnetic waves, but divided by fences and borders. Affluent Western populations are beginning to learn what the rest of the world’s population has known for a long time: infrastructures are fragile and vulnerable. They are not always invisible; sometimes they are overtly visible, overburdened, and dysfunctional.
The research unit employs a dual definition of “infrastructure”. The more common meaning refers to railways, roads and networks that transport and distribute commodities, energy, and water, thereby enabling structures and institutions. However, in recent years, “infrastructure” has also increasingly come to refer to underlying conditions, ways of life, discourses, and institutions, including affects, self-images, habitus, habits, and processes of subjectification. These infrastructures are not immaterial or metaphorical; they have their own materiality and manifest in practices. The two definitions are interrelated: built infrastructures shape the social and affective ones, producing living environments, self-perceptions, emotions, and communities. On the other hand, they are not merely functional but embody what Cornelius Castoriadis calls the ‘social imaginary’. Infrastructures express, without saying a word, which lives should be supported, by whom, and with which resources. They are gendered and racialised, and access to them is distributed in highly unequal ways. Artistic practices can serve as a means not only to ‘represent’ infrastructures, but also to explore how worlds are constituted by them, and to experiment with alternative practices.
The research will focus on three core areas. Firstly, infrastructures are based on imaginations of coexistence. Aesthetic practices can explore these concepts and envision alternative infrastructures. Project 1: Hollowed-Out Landscapes: Imaginations of Life amid Infrastructures of Extraction by Jörn Etzold, Katarína Marková and Jana Kerima Stolzer examines the role of art institutions in areas affected by the trauma of deindustrialisation, such as the Ruhr Region and Slovakia. They imagine other futures, but remain dependent on a persistent economy of extraction, as a comparison with Brazil shows. In Project 2: Cinematic Scenes of Infrastructure, Oliver Fahle, Felix Hasebrink, and Jennifer Wermuth examine scenes in which infrastructures begin to act from historical and contemporary perspectives. Cinema not only depicts infrastructure, but also imagines it.
The second core area addresses the question of aesthesis: how do infrastructures shape what can be sensed and experienced, and by whom? Project 3: Aesthetic Practices of Attunement as Access to Colonial Infrastructures of Extraction, by Henriette Gunkel, Sam Nightingale, and Takudzwa Mukesi, examines artistic practices that commemorate the genocide of the Nama and Herero peoples in Namibia, which was linked to gold extraction. In Project 4: Extractivism and Infrastructure in Brazilian Literature, Tomaz Amorim researches how modernist Brazilian literature created an extractive imagination, contrasting it with the work of contemporary Quilombola and Indigenous writers.
Finally, the core area participation will explore how infrastructures regulate access to society prior to any public negotiation. Isabell Lorey, Sara Jiménez Fernández, and Francesco Salvini (pantxo ramas) will examine Spanish neighbourhoods that are facing excessive gentrification and touristification in Project 5: Infrastructures of Care: Sound, Social Editing and Ciudadanía. In Project 6: Race as Infrastructure and Literary Infrastructures of Resistance, Laura Bieger, Natalie Erkel, and Esther Adeyemo examine literary genres as infrastructures that produce race. Literary genres are not as harmless as they might seem, since they determine social positions.
The scientific coordination of the group is Ruth Schmidt, whose PhD thesis on imaginary infrastructures will be published shortly.