Over the past decade, infrastructures have become a vast field of both scholarly research and artistic concern as well as the label for a set of methodologies and theoretical approaches. Echoing the Marxist opposition of "Basis und Überbau", often rendered as "infrastructure and superstructure" in English, the notion of infrastructure signals another materialist turn. From data centers, deep sea cables, and electrical grids to legal codes, budget airlines, or the labor that takes care of our garbage – as an analytical category infrastructure asks that we direct our attention to the stuff that keeps art and culture going. In doing so, it brings into perspective questions of reproduction and (potential) change and of the working of power.

Within the field of art, the term infrastructure is most often associated with the "infrastructural critique" that has recently been pitted against institutional critique by thinkers including Kerstin Stakemeier and Marina Vishmidt and with artists such as Carolyn Lazard, Cameron Rowland, or Mierle Laderman Ukeles. In this seminar we will examine works by these artists and theorists, but also seek to broaden our understanding of infrastructure by engaging with a larger, more heterogeneous set of theories and approaches.