Traditional modern infrastructures have been joined, and transformed, by digital infrastructures and given rise to new forms of digital and platform capitalism. Terms like green infrastructure or blue infrastructure make understood how so-called natural resources are seen as ecosystem services for carbon storage or pollution removal. Social infrastructure refers to facilities that support social services including housing, healthcare, and education. Infrastructure is ubiquitous, essential, and often invisible. Infrastructure requires permanent maintenance, repair, and care.

Since March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has raised global awareness for essential critical infrastructure and its workforce. In ongoing wars and conflicts such as in Ethiopia, Iran, Yemen, Nagorno Karabakh, or the Ukraine critical infrastructures are under daily attack. In 2007, hundreds of tribal Indians camped out in front of Brazil’s congress to protest new infrastructure project, dams and roads, that threaten their survival. The Idle No More movement, started in Canada in 2012, used blockades of train lines as a means of protest and, at the same time, raised awareness of the infrastructure crisis. In 2023, Lützerath anti-coal protesters retreated to underground tunnels. Climate activism uses the blocking of infrastructure including highways and metro services as a means of protest. Infrastructure is a perpetrator of environmental violence.

Today, we live in the aftermath and the afterlife of the modern infrastructural condition that has led infrastructuralization of the planet. With human life and survival dependent upon reliable infrastructure, there is, at the same time growing awareness, that infrastructure continues to wound the planet and to make the climate catastrophe worse.“Infrastructure was that which enables military movements, infrastructure today seeks to become adequate to movement as a relational and scalable problem.” (Mitropoulos 2012) Today, there is growing awareness that we are living with a “wounded planet” (Krasny 2022). Infrastructure is implicated in, and responsible for, the anthropogenic climate catastrophe as well as in growing social and ecological injustice and inequalities. Infrastructure is essential to dignified and safer living conditions. At the same time, infrastructure continues to wound the planet. Infrastructure is the “hidden point of contact and access between all of us” (Easterling 2014). The “demand for infrastructure” is “a demand for a certain inhabitable ground” (Butler 2015).

This special issue is interested in feminist approaches and methodologies that center on how contemporary artistic practice engages with infrastructural activism, infrastructural violence, infrastructural justice, infrastructural liberation, infrastructural care, maintenance and repair. We are inviting contributions that think with and through contemporary artistic practice to understand how art-making contributes to ‘feminist infrastructural critique’ as well as ‘feminist infrastructural transformation’. Contending that matters of infrastructure are a feminist issue and arguing that twenty-first century art practice provides ways of seeing, knowing, performing or transforming infrastructure, the special issue invites essays that are interested in working on infrastructure feminism as a critical approach in contemporary art history. Art-making is understood as ethico-aesthetic, material, and epistemic practice connecting human and non-human bodies, environments, resources or technologies and questioning the border that has been drawn between life and non-life. In this sense, art history, as a discipline, is seen as porous and open to insights on infrastructure as they have been developed in disciplines including, but not limited to, urbanism, architecture, philosophy, anthropology, history, the environmental, digital, legal or medical humanities, gender studies, crip studies or critical race studies.

We are welcoming essays:

- that think with and through artistic practice that contributes to resisting, transforming, decolonizing, queering, commoning, and cripping infrastructure
- that develop feminist methodological approaches to ethical, social, environmental, health, and epistemic dimensions of infrastructure as they are addressed in twenty-first century art practice
- that reflect upon, and contribute to, artistic practice that is part of infrastructural activism
- that think with art and activism dedicated to establishing performative, healing, and self-governed infrastructures; examples include, but are not limited to feminist health care, housing, day care, the feminist internet, open source groups, or hydrofeminism
- that engage with art-making that connects human and non-human bodies, environments, resources or technologies to imagine new forms of infrastructural mutual aid as well as human-non-human alliances
- that think with and reflect upon current artistic practice that responds to essential infrastructural needs as highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate catastrophe and ongoing wars in different parts of the world
- that think with and through artistic practice that encourages resistant, liberating, emancipatory or transformative uses of infrastructure including new forms of mending, care-taking and repairing with a particular focus on gendered, racialized, sexualized, and environmental dimensions of infrastructural maintenance
- that think with art practice that confronts infrastructural ableism, sexism, racism, and environmental harm

Deadline for abstracts: March 30, 2023.

Please send proposals including a title of the proposed contribution; an abstract (up to 250 words) outlining the proposed contribution including the chosen artistic example and literature; a bio up to 100 words).

Notification of authors: April 15, 2023
Submission of essays (in English, maximum 6,000 words): September 15, 2023
The journal is peer-reviewed. Editorial feedback, peer review process September – December 2023.
Planned Publication of the special issue: Spring 2024