by Prof. Dr. Isabell Lorey,
Sara Jiménez Fernández, Francesco Salvini (pantxo ramas)
The project focuses on instituent practices (Raunig 2007) between situated social care relations and infrastructures of care, in order to elaborate forms of democratic cuidadanía (a care-based citizenship), which emerged in queer-feminist discourses and social movements in Spain during the 2000s (Precarias 2014, Lorey 2015/2022). Although the occupation and democracy movements of the early 2010s drew on cuidadanía to address the basic needs of the local and migrant population in the context of increasing precarization, the concept remains only roughly outlined. How a cuidadanía can be systematically imagined and realized institutionally and infrastructurally remains a gap that TP 5 aims to bridge by developing concrete and philosophical proposals. To do so, it need not invent anything entirely new, but rather recognize existing practices and bring them into resonance with one another, not least by recalling and updating forgotten practices.
The project examines micro structures and practices that, in different ways, support, expand, and replace public supply infrastructures through interconnections among people, things, and environments, thereby opening up the space of imagination for new possibilities of participation within the contemporary political present (Lorey 2022). The project focuses on Spain and investigates historical infrastructures of care in psychiatric institutions from the 1920s to the 1950s, as well as resistant care infrastructures emerging in neighborhoods of Málaga and near Barcelona, which currently emerge between a politically active society and the dismantled and restructured infrastructures of the welfare state. The project experiments with aesthetic practices of sound and editing that are involved in care infrastructures in different ways. In addition, it explores concrete geopolitical resonances in France and Brazil.
The overarching project VAGABONDING CARE (Prof. Dr. Isabell Lorey) analyzes and actualizes forgotten psychiatric infrastructures of care in the surround of Catalan-French psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912–1994) from the first half of the twentieth century. Within this related therapeutic understanding, care is conceived as mobile and vagabonding and can be grasped theoretically and conceptually not only as an infrastructuring but also as an instituent practice: listening, body rhythms, resonances, and cooperative editorial processes are central here. The subproject SOCIAL EDITING (Francesco Salvini, PhD) focuses on contemporary healthcare infrastructures and self-organized neighborhood support networks, especially in the Gornal district of L’Hospitalet near Barcelona, where it is engaged in situated research, particularly in the production of “editorial” objects. In a similar vein, the second subproject SONIC MATTERING (Sara Jiménez Fernández), against the backdrop of touristification, concentrates primarily on the Lagunillas neighborhood in Málaga. It investigates self-organized neighborhood infrastructures of care and the role that sound plays in the production, encounter, and memory of different forms of infrastructural socio-spatial compositions of care.
→ Gerald Raunig, ”Instituent Practices, No. 2: Institutional Critique, Constituent Power, and the Persistence of Instituting”, transversal. Multilingual webjournal, Jan. 2007, https://transversal.at/transversal/0507/raunig/en.
→ Precarias a la deriva, Was ist dein Streik?, Vienna et al., 2014.
→ Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity. Government of the Precarious, London, 2015.
→ Isabell Lorey, Democracy in the Political Present, London, 2022.
Framework Project
by Prof. Dr. Isabell Lorey (PI)
The focus of this framework project is on the political-philosophical actualisation of historical psychiatric care and support infrastructures in Catalonia (Spain) and Occitania (France). In both regions, therapeutic institutions and care infrastructures were reimagined and put into practice, particularly from the 1920s to the 1950s—practices that then had a massive influence on international psychiatric reforms beginning in the 1960s. These early therapeutic practices and debates, which should be understood as anti-fascist, emancipatory social and political practices emerging from societal deviantization, also form the now largely overlooked foundation of poststructuralist and decolonial political philosophy. These care infrastructures are largely unknown in German-speaking regions, though they are currently being brought to light once again in the international art field. The central figure around whom current archival, curatorial, and editorial activities revolve is the Catalan-French psychiatrist François Tosquelles and his political-therapeutic milieu.
The framework project speaks of “vagabonding care” because Tosquelles links the rhythm, the movement of instituting and infrastructuring care with the “right to vagabonding” and thinks from the perspective of vagabondage—the historically deviant, non-sedentary wandering, the literal traversal of geography—from the stimulation of the feet that rhythmize the entire body within the environment.
The framework project “Vagabonding Care” will interweave and critically discuss these historical institutional and infrastructuring care practices of revolutionary psychiatry with the help of situated research from subproject 1 and 2 in the neighborhoods of Gornal on the outskirts of Barcelona and Lagunillas in Málaga. In the resulting spatio-temporal constellation of instituent practices—which emerged primarily in the rural French periphery at the Saint-Alban Clinic in the Lozère beginning in the 1940s—and the rhythmic, instituent imaginary of the urban periphery in the political present, new democratic practices of care can be invented. [project description]
See: “QUEER TOSQUELLES: Anti-fascism, Vagabonding Psychiatry, Non-identitarian Lives”, transversal. Multilingual webjournal, Oct. 2025, https://transversal.at/transversal/1025
See also:
Subproject 1
by Sara Jimenéz Fernández (PhD candidate)
Sonic Mattering is an investigation into how sound contributes to the creation of care infrastructures. Primarily based in Málaga as a peripheral, border territory, the project examines self-organised care infrastructures and the role that sound plays in producing, encountering and remembering socio-spatial compositions of care in the context of dispossession accelerated by touristification.
Assuming that touristic cities are increasingly organised through visual capture, the circulation of images and the management of experience, the project considers how sociality, memory and political imagination can be sustained through listening, resonance and vibration. In this context, sound is not approached as a secondary cultural layer, but as a material and disruptive force capable of shaping attention, relations, and collective life.
Conceptually, the project develops the notion of «aural infrastructures» to describe the material, bodily, technical, affective and political arrangements that sustain shared listening, and that make certain forms of care, belonging and collective perception possible. These infrastructures are explored through experimental sonic practices, including collective listening, recording, radio and voice practices, resonant gatherings and situated forms of sound-based knowledge production.
Sonic Mattering treats listening as a situated and collective practice rather than neutral observation. This includes engagement with listening protocols, collective sessions and the concept of the survey as a listening process, through which shared attention can become a form of political analysis and organisation in the context of the housing crisis.
It also means engaging with specific sonic and vibrational forms of life, such as Verdiales, in connection with other peripheral territories' sonic practices as forms of situated encounter, to understand how collective rhythms, embodied participation and oral memory can sustain infrastructures of care while resisting capture by the mechanisms of commodification. In this way, Sonic Mattering explores how sound can sustain situated forms of care, collective attention and political imagination across territories marked by dispossession, while opening other ways of inhabiting and composing the social.
See also:
Subproject 2
by Francesco Salvini (pantxo ramas) (PhD candidate)
Social Edition investigates how care is organised at the threshold between situated practices and public infrastructures, focusing on the material, continuous transformations and mediations that shape care infrastructures and their surroundings. I consider this a key locus where the organisation of care, vis-à-vis its ordering, radically foregrounds the issue at the core of this project: what practices of care can sustain the material fabrication of an alter-ontology for citizenship? Specifically, through researching and participating in the social and institutional infrastructuring of care in southern European urban landscapes. Care infrastructures can be understood as thresholds where to contest the vertical logics of dispossession and discipline that public policies often translate into urban life—particularly at its margins—as well as sites where to sustain a radically democratic invention of institutional practices. These infrastructural edges operate as interfaces between a mobilised society and the institutional field, remaining fertile precisely because they are unstable, negotiated, and incomplete. It is within these interfaces that experimental practices can generate durable consequences in the ongoing infrastructuring of care—an infrastructuring that is necessarily existing, contradictory, and situated—while at the same time performing, prefiguring, and editing elements for an alter-ontology in citizenship. The research will begin from a Primary Healthcare Centre and its surrounding ecology: community networks, public and private spaces, and social and state institutions. It will develop through the collaborative making of critical materials—texts in different formats such as booklets, performances, or audio works—that participate in perceiving and affecting existing care infrastructures. These materials will engage with infrastructures in their failures, repairs, maintenance, and transformations, participating in institutional experiments, community projects, and cultural struggles within the specific context of the Barcelona metropolitan area.
See also:
by Prof. Dr. Isabell Lorey,
Sara Jiménez Fernández, Francesco Salvini (pantxo ramas)
The project focuses on instituent practices (Raunig 2007) between situated social care relations and infrastructures of care, in order to elaborate forms of democratic cuidadanía (a care-based citizenship), which emerged in queer-feminist discourses and social movements in Spain during the 2000s (Precarias 2014, Lorey 2015/2022). Although the occupation and democracy movements of the early 2010s drew on cuidadanía to address the basic needs of the local and migrant population in the context of increasing precarization, the concept remains only roughly outlined. How a cuidadanía can be systematically imagined and realized institutionally and infrastructurally remains a gap that TP 5 aims to bridge by developing concrete and philosophical proposals. To do so, it need not invent anything entirely new, but rather recognize existing practices and bring them into resonance with one another, not least by recalling and updating forgotten practices.
The project examines micro structures and practices that, in different ways, support, expand, and replace public supply infrastructures through interconnections among people, things, and environments, thereby opening up the space of imagination for new possibilities of participation within the contemporary political present (Lorey 2022). The project focuses on Spain and investigates historical infrastructures of care in psychiatric institutions from the 1920s to the 1950s, as well as resistant care infrastructures emerging in neighborhoods of Málaga and near Barcelona, which currently emerge between a politically active society and the dismantled and restructured infrastructures of the welfare state. The project experiments with aesthetic practices of sound and editing that are involved in care infrastructures in different ways. In addition, it explores concrete geopolitical resonances in France and Brazil.
The overarching project VAGABONDING CARE (Prof. Dr. Isabell Lorey) analyzes and actualizes forgotten psychiatric infrastructures of care in the surround of Catalan-French psychiatrist François Tosquelles (1912–1994) from the first half of the twentieth century. Within this related therapeutic understanding, care is conceived as mobile and vagabonding and can be grasped theoretically and conceptually not only as an infrastructuring but also as an instituent practice: listening, body rhythms, resonances, and cooperative editorial processes are central here. The subproject SOCIAL EDITING (Francesco Salvini, PhD) focuses on contemporary healthcare infrastructures and self-organized neighborhood support networks, especially in the Gornal district of L’Hospitalet near Barcelona, where it is engaged in situated research, particularly in the production of “editorial” objects. In a similar vein, the second subproject SONIC MATTERING (Sara Jiménez Fernández), against the backdrop of touristification, concentrates primarily on the Lagunillas neighborhood in Málaga. It investigates self-organized neighborhood infrastructures of care and the role that sound plays in the production, encounter, and memory of different forms of infrastructural socio-spatial compositions of care.
→ Gerald Raunig, ”Instituent Practices, No. 2: Institutional Critique, Constituent Power, and the Persistence of Instituting”, transversal. Multilingual webjournal, Jan. 2007, https://transversal.at/transversal/0507/raunig/en.
→ Precarias a la deriva, Was ist dein Streik?, Vienna et al., 2014.
→ Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity. Government of the Precarious, London, 2015.
→ Isabell Lorey, Democracy in the Political Present, London, 2022.
Framework Project
by Prof. Dr. Isabell Lorey (PI)
The focus of this framework project is on the political-philosophical actualisation of historical psychiatric care and support infrastructures in Catalonia (Spain) and Occitania (France). In both regions, therapeutic institutions and care infrastructures were reimagined and put into practice, particularly from the 1920s to the 1950s—practices that then had a massive influence on international psychiatric reforms beginning in the 1960s. These early therapeutic practices and debates, which should be understood as anti-fascist, emancipatory social and political practices emerging from societal deviantization, also form the now largely overlooked foundation of poststructuralist and decolonial political philosophy. These care infrastructures are largely unknown in German-speaking regions, though they are currently being brought to light once again in the international art field. The central figure around whom current archival, curatorial, and editorial activities revolve is the Catalan-French psychiatrist François Tosquelles and his political-therapeutic milieu.
The framework project speaks of “vagabonding care” because Tosquelles links the rhythm, the movement of instituting and infrastructuring care with the “right to vagabonding” and thinks from the perspective of vagabondage—the historically deviant, non-sedentary wandering, the literal traversal of geography—from the stimulation of the feet that rhythmize the entire body within the environment.
The framework project “Vagabonding Care” will interweave and critically discuss these historical institutional and infrastructuring care practices of revolutionary psychiatry with the help of situated research from subproject 1 and 2 in the neighborhoods of Gornal on the outskirts of Barcelona and Lagunillas in Málaga. In the resulting spatio-temporal constellation of instituent practices—which emerged primarily in the rural French periphery at the Saint-Alban Clinic in the Lozère beginning in the 1940s—and the rhythmic, instituent imaginary of the urban periphery in the political present, new democratic practices of care can be invented. [project description]
See: “QUEER TOSQUELLES: Anti-fascism, Vagabonding Psychiatry, Non-identitarian Lives”, transversal. Multilingual webjournal, Oct. 2025, https://transversal.at/transversal/1025
See also:
Subproject 1
by Sara Jimenéz Fernández (PhD candidate)
Sonic Mattering is an investigation into how sound contributes to the creation of care infrastructures. Primarily based in Málaga as a peripheral, border territory, the project examines self-organised care infrastructures and the role that sound plays in producing, encountering and remembering socio-spatial compositions of care in the context of dispossession accelerated by touristification.
Assuming that touristic cities are increasingly organised through visual capture, the circulation of images and the management of experience, the project considers how sociality, memory and political imagination can be sustained through listening, resonance and vibration. In this context, sound is not approached as a secondary cultural layer, but as a material and disruptive force capable of shaping attention, relations, and collective life.
Conceptually, the project develops the notion of «aural infrastructures» to describe the material, bodily, technical, affective and political arrangements that sustain shared listening, and that make certain forms of care, belonging and collective perception possible. These infrastructures are explored through experimental sonic practices, including collective listening, recording, radio and voice practices, resonant gatherings and situated forms of sound-based knowledge production.
Sonic Mattering treats listening as a situated and collective practice rather than neutral observation. This includes engagement with listening protocols, collective sessions and the concept of the survey as a listening process, through which shared attention can become a form of political analysis and organisation in the context of the housing crisis.
It also means engaging with specific sonic and vibrational forms of life, such as Verdiales, in connection with other peripheral territories' sonic practices as forms of situated encounter, to understand how collective rhythms, embodied participation and oral memory can sustain infrastructures of care while resisting capture by the mechanisms of commodification. In this way, Sonic Mattering explores how sound can sustain situated forms of care, collective attention and political imagination across territories marked by dispossession, while opening other ways of inhabiting and composing the social.
See also:
Subproject 2
by Francesco Salvini (pantxo ramas) (PhD candidate)
Social Edition investigates how care is organised at the threshold between situated practices and public infrastructures, focusing on the material, continuous transformations and mediations that shape care infrastructures and their surroundings. I consider this a key locus where the organisation of care, vis-à-vis its ordering, radically foregrounds the issue at the core of this project: what practices of care can sustain the material fabrication of an alter-ontology for citizenship? Specifically, through researching and participating in the social and institutional infrastructuring of care in southern European urban landscapes. Care infrastructures can be understood as thresholds where to contest the vertical logics of dispossession and discipline that public policies often translate into urban life—particularly at its margins—as well as sites where to sustain a radically democratic invention of institutional practices. These infrastructural edges operate as interfaces between a mobilised society and the institutional field, remaining fertile precisely because they are unstable, negotiated, and incomplete. It is within these interfaces that experimental practices can generate durable consequences in the ongoing infrastructuring of care—an infrastructuring that is necessarily existing, contradictory, and situated—while at the same time performing, prefiguring, and editing elements for an alter-ontology in citizenship. The research will begin from a Primary Healthcare Centre and its surrounding ecology: community networks, public and private spaces, and social and state institutions. It will develop through the collaborative making of critical materials—texts in different formats such as booklets, performances, or audio works—that participate in perceiving and affecting existing care infrastructures. These materials will engage with infrastructures in their failures, repairs, maintenance, and transformations, participating in institutional experiments, community projects, and cultural struggles within the specific context of the Barcelona metropolitan area.
See also: