The research is based on a dual concept of infrastructure. First, the term refers to the physical foundation of shared existence, as seen in roads, railways, and water pipes. Second, infrastructures are understood as underlying processes through which subjects, communities, and societies emerge, shaping their perception of their worlds and their actions. Both forms of infrastructure interact: Built infrastructures constitute ways of life, and presuppositions about which life should be lived and supplied by whom generate built infrastructures. The projects explore artistic works, communities, historical conditions, and institutions that address the legacy and persistence of colonial, gendered, racializing, and extractivist infrastructures. Adopting a transnational approach, they particularly examine infrastructures in the global peripheries and semi-peripheries of the transforming world-system.

The research is divided into three core areas. First, the group examines the IMAGINARY forces and power dispositions that lead to the establishment, maintenance, repair, or neglect of infrastructures. Second, the group investigates the sensory and perceptual experiences (AISTHESIS) made possible or impossible by infrastructures, as well as the ways infrastructures itselves becomes perceptible. Third, the group explores forms of distributive agency in infrastructure use and alternative, bottom-up “infra-structuring” practices that enable PARTICIPATION.

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.

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