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- Convenors:
-
Johannes Bruder
(Critical Media Lab Basel)
Asia Bazdyrieva (Linz University of Arts and Design Critical Media Lab Basel)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel invites contributions that engage with the re-negotiation of sovereignties via ‘transformative’ infrastructures. It seeks to foster a conversation between infrastructure studies and artistic research to re-imagine infrastructures as sites of knowledge production and anchors of solidarity.
Long Abstract:
Just three days after Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border on February 24th, 2022, German chancellor Olaf Scholz declared the arrival of Zeitenwende— an epochal shift in the "history of our continent." While the speech was intended as a condemnation of Russia's escalation of the military intervention into a sovereign state, it was mainly centered on interweaving Germany's further militarization with newly proposed energy policies, which "is not only crucial for our economy and our climate, but also crucial for our security." Against the backdrop of the Russian invasion and related threats to the continuous supply of energy in Central Europe, Scholz speech presented concerns about energy sovereignty and security as environmental ones. That is, despite its ambitious statements about a greener and cleaner future, the technopolitical solutions that were quickly mobilized re-conceived postwar inter-imperial logics through “a geographical schematization of diplomatic-strategic relations with a geographic-economic analysis of resources” (Grove 2019) or “sustainable sovereignties” (Riofrancos 2023).
Put differently, the talk of an impending Zeitenwende mobilizes tropes of transformation to re-legitimate and transform existing power geometries (Massey 1994) through new (energy) infrastructures. This combined format open panel provides space and time for discussing similar cases where sovereignties are re-negotiated via ‘transformative’ infrastructures. We therefore approach infrastructures as media of transformation: they support, communicate, and make tangible what transformation means. Conversely, media that engage with ‘transformative’ infrastructures have the capacity to re-imagine transformation. We invite both traditional papers and artistic contributions (esp. moving image) that re-mediate processes of transformation by attending to their infrastructures. It seeks to foster a conversation between scholars from infrastructure studies (STS & media studies) and artistic researchers to move beyond analysis and towards experimental formats of documenting and re-imagining infrastructures as crucial sites of knowledge production and anchors of solidarity.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Asia Bazdyrieva (Linz University of Arts and Design Critical Media Lab Basel)
Short abstract:
This paper elaborates on juxtapositions of sustainability, dispositives of ‘energy security’, and geopolitical considerations as exemplified in the discourse around the German “Zeitenwende” in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Long abstract:
This paper elaborates on juxtapositions of sustainability, dispositives of ‘energy security’, and geopolitical considerations as exemplified in the discourse around the German “Zeitenwende” in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We analyze processes of on-shoring and emerging ‘sustainable’ sovereignties in the transition from petro-infrastructures such as Nord Stream to ‘clean’ energy infrastructures, exemplified by the European Hydrogen Backbone. Our paper emphasizes the activities that political groups, firms, cartels, and other actors are empowered to undertake in energy transit states, to further a more nuanced understanding of neocolonial interests of big European powers that openly see the current war on Ukraine as both “a challenge and an opportunity.”
Sasha Shestakova
Short abstract:
This paper will discuss photography as a form of "infrastructural mediation" to understand its role in the Soviet and Russian settler colonial projects. It will do so by using "Ogonek" magazine and the way, how infrastructural geoengineering was represented in it as a case study.
Long abstract:
In my paper, I will discuss the role that Soviet photography played in contesting Indigenous land sovereignties during the Cold War. To do that, I will use the notion of “infrastructural mediation”, developed by Rafico Ruiz in the context of the Canadian settler colonial project. He defines it as “a means to examine how colonial lifeworlds, subjectivities, and affects come into being through the design, building, maintenance, and repair of infrastructures that respond to resource frontier–making projects as settler media-making projects as well” ((Ruiz, 2021, 17). I expand on the theoretical framework of critical infrastructure studies to see photography's role in establishing control of land and people. I argue that the photographs participated in the "worldmaking" (Carse, 2016) of the Soviet settler colonial project.
I do so by looking at the example of the “Ogonek” (small fire) magazine. One of its functions during the Cold War was to “bring infrastructures close to the people”(Werneke, 2021). In my presentation, I argue that the portrayal of the Soviet infrastructures of extraction of resources rendered land as “terra nulus”, thus participating in the destruction of Indigenous sovereignty. The consequences of the Soviet “resorcification” (Bazdyrieva, 2022) of land continue in the Russian colonial project. They manifest themselves both in the continued resource extraction and the contemporary Russian legislation, which erases Indigenous relations to land, making sovereignty outside of the colonial relations of property impossible.
Sonya Isupova (HEAD Geneva) Anatolii Chernov (Individual entrepreneur)
Short abstract:
Looking closer at the remote-sensing infrastructures, and their problematics. As well as questioning maps and mapping processes all to sense changes in the landscape that are occurring daily due to the current war in Ukraine.
Long abstract:
In the early hours of 6 June, an explosion destroyed a critical infrastructure in southern Ukraine – the Nova Kakhovka dam. This vast amount of water was unleashed downstream along the Dnipro River, flooding dozens of settlements.
Although floodwaters have receded, they have carried tons of debris into the Black Sea and Odesa's coastline, causing what Ukraine called an "ecocide". A recent report from the area has brought to light additional unexpected consequences of the fluctuating water levels. One notable observation includes a significant proliferation of willow trees now spreading across the area that was previously submerged.
With Earth Scientist Anatolii Chernov, PhD, we analyze satellite vegetation data post the Kakhovka Dam's destruction, tracking landscape changes six months later. Delving into the region's deep histories, the Nikopol region and Dnipro river landscapes.
Mapping Uncertain Landscape consists of a plotter machine continuously drawing maps of the Ukrainian terrain on a large roll of paper. The images being printed take their data from various open-source satellite platforms. Through extensive observation and a meticulous process of printing, drawing, and re-drawing the vegetation levels surrounding the Kakhovka Dam area, my objective is to discern patterns, transformations, and deviations. It's akin to witnessing a transformation of the area, observing how it responds when the infrastructure is dismantled and how the land asserts itself, reclaiming its original form.
Lina Bondarenko (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Short abstract:
Ukraine's soil became an agricultural powerhouse through industrialized ports and dams on the Dnipro River. Russia's invasion is an attack on the "Breadbasket of Europe," with targeted destruction threatening Ukraine's environment, risking ecocide of its environment.
Long abstract:
Ukraine’s land, a mass of fertile black chernozem, became an engineered machine for the production and export of agriculture largely through the Soviet construction of grain ports and dams along the Dnipro River in the 20th century. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the immediate violence of human casualties has transitioned into an attack on the planet’s metabolism of wheat, known as the Breadbasket of Europe. Through targeted destruction of the water and agricultural infrastructure it once helped build, Russia is jeopardizing the environmental future of the soils and waterways of Ukraine, resulting in a slow violence of ecocide of an entire disturbed ecosystem.
By continuously squandering the vitality of the soil, Russia historically and currently weaponizes the metabolic rift between human beings and the earth through Ukraine’s soils and grains. This fracture extends far beyond Ukraine’s borders, and as a result, the breadbasket does not carry merely future bread, but in each industrial grain export instead carries the traumas of the violence itself. As political geographies eclipse humanity’s ability to make kin with its geomorphology, the post-Anthropocene climate’s rate of destruction accelerates.
This op-ed style research paper is the vehicle for a series of 9 large scale architectural graphic drawings ranging from maps, timelines, planting almanacs, biological diagrams, and mythological histories. Each drawings aims to narrate a key aspect of the argument while also standing as independent artworks for tracing throughlines between ecocide at odds with the planet's looming climate emergency.
Anastasia Kubrak (Critical Media Lab Basel) Johannes Bruder (Critical Media Lab Basel)
Short abstract:
Our paper elaborates on efforts to ‘onshore’ lithium mining in central Europe in the context of the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act. Based on snippets from the CRMA and ethnographic vignettes, we discuss how abstract ideas of resilience are taking shape in regions considered ripe for transformation.
Long abstract:
Announced shortly after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) manifested new policies that seek to “onshore” (Riofrancos 2023) the mining of strategic metals. The CRMA was conceived to increase the resilience of vulnerable supply chains and marginalize the Union’s reliance on single suppliers of critical minerals; at the same time, it mediates fantasies of an abundant supply of energy and wealth.
Lithium is a central element of the anticipated, twin green and digital transition and therefore sits at the heart of onshoring efforts. Cínovec, on the border of the Czech Republic and Germany is a prospective extraction site where lithium comes with a peculiar promise of a transformation. The exploitation of Europe’s biggest hard-rock lithium deposit is imagined to remediate the pains of a region exhausted by previous mining operations, reminiscent of the early medical uses of lithium for the treatment of mental exhaustion. While a consortium of European funds and multinational companies keeps making strategic investments in exploration and generates ‘resource affect’ (Weszkalnys 2019), the prospective mine meets resistance from the communities wary of the environmental effects of extractive processes.
Reading between the lines of the CRMA and through personal ethnographic vignettes from Northern Bohemia, this contribution discusses how lithium gets coopted within the imaginary of sustainable development, thus mediating hopes and uncertainties that the politics of resilience bring about.
amir khorasani (Bremen University)
Long abstract:
How have the “suspended” infrastructural projects (Rathgeb Aung, 2022) contributed to a shift in the language of previously reformist social movements into a more radicalized one in Iran? This study suggests that the infrastructure halt brought about by Trump's sanctions in the previous five years has had a significant impact on social protests in Iran by complicating the modernization narrative and disrupting the "promissory nature of infrastructure" (Hetherington, 2014).
Before Trump's actions, during nuclear negotiations, the Iranian reformist state asserted that resolving tensions with the West would modernize energy infrastructure, bringing prosperity and contemporaneity to Iranians. Following Trump's announcement of the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, once again foreign companies exited Iran's infrastructural energy projects, oil sales declined, and crucial infrastructural plans froze due to budget deficits and restrictions on money transfers. A pervasive sense of infrastructural halt overshadowed the country, which has complicated the narrative of progress toward "independence and industrialization" (Koyagi, 2021). The transformative impact of "unfinished and unbuilt" infrastructural projects (Corse & Kneas, 2019) overshadowed social protests in the country as different factions of the state struggled to uphold the promise of modernization through the promise of new deal or sanction-neutralizing policies. Despite these efforts, no narrative proved strong enough to restore confidence in the future.
This study delves into how sanctions closed the horizon of the future and influenced social protests in Iran, diminishing the role of mediatory activists and movements in navigating the evolving socio-political landscape.