Editorial

New Silk Roads, a project by e-flux Architecture and Aformal Academy, returns in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA) in the context of their exhibition “The Geopolitics of Infrastructure,” which has been organized within the framework of the L’Internationale project “Museum of the Commons." It features contributions by Malek Al-Sarnamy, Köken Ergun, Bruno Maçães, Kshitija Mruthyunjaya, Shahana Rajani, Dorothy Tang, and more.

Infrastructure underpins the global circulation of objects, ideas, information, and people. It facilitates the flows, exchanges, and support structures that shape our lives, livelihoods, and societies. Infrastructure is both a “thing” and the relation between things. This duality of being simultaneously visible and invisible, tangible and intangible, positions infrastructure as something that is complex, conceptual, and just as much about its maintenance as it is its promise.

Infrastructure is also a source of enchantment. Whether public, private, or some hybrid of both, infrastructure projects have become potent symbols of modernization, aspiration, influence, and power in many parts of the world. Over the past few decades, infrastructure projects have become so vast that they increasingly perform the role of the superstructure, even a form of extrastatecraft, strengthening state power as its proxy.1 Infrastructure exposes the complexity of geopolitics.

The increasing geostrategic role that infrastructure assumes today—and the long-termism it embodies in the political imaginary—is accompanied by a shift in the global balance of power. In what is now effectively a multipolar world, infrastructure is a major geopolitical factor between nations, from partnership and competition, to dependency and subjugation. New strategic formations amongst states take shape on a near-daily basis, sometimes moderating or even transplanting former alliances.

Infrastructure’s geopolitical machinations can often remain highly opaque. New forms of analysis are therefore needed to understand the extent to which different societies are shaped by and potentially resistant to these trans-national developments. The cultural field is uniquely equipped to analyze the aesthetics of power that infrastructure projects, zooming between their geostrategic interests and social and environmental impacts. Yet having already built historical perspectives on politics and power, it is increasingly urgent for the cultural fields to rethink what trans-national perspectives and even internationalisms mean today and for tomorrow.