Photo: Marija Jančić
Marina Vishmidt taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna for five months prior to her death at age forty-seven in April 2024. A death like hers is really a double injustice: Cutting one life unbearably short, it also gives new life to the lives that surround it. She disappears; we gain a new sense of existence. We experience her death as an irreparable loss; and yet it changes our perception of her life, as well as, through hers, our own. And so while we gain through what we lose, Marina really loses twice: both the abstract potential of the future, and also the specific intensity of the present, lived in her absence. We don’t believe in the sanctity of credit-debt relations, but it’s hard not to see this as a transfer of potential, so to speak, that we owe her. And it’s to the same degree that this debt, like so many others, is unpayable, that we feel the urgency of the desire to repay it.
That’s one way for us to begin to talk about the tone and the atmosphere of this academic conference. “What Is Infrastructural Critique?” was hosted by the Department of Art and Communication Practices, Institute of Studies in Art and Art Education, University of Applied Arts Vienna, led by Sofia Bempeza and Annette Krauss. Held in celebration of Marina’s “life” and “work,” it invoked two abstract and, in this context, apparently innocuous categories, the separation and naturalization of which Marina was an inventive and unstinting critic. The writers, artists, curators, friends, and comrades who participated in the event spoke in many different ways about her life, as well as her friendship, teaching, playing, and political organizing. They also spoke in many different ways about her work, especially her work on the concept of infrastructure in its endlessly forking relationships to social reproduction, genocide and erasure, dust, extraction, embodiment, exhaustion, noise, abolition, and so much else. But at every step of the way the animating principle of the conversation was love, which is to say the shared loved for a comrade and a friend, “a particular being, no category, no possibility of repetition, who I will never see again” (Hannah Black), to whom we owe an unpayable debt.
One of us opened the event by asking about the problem of movement. We wanted to know about a double problem: what movement looks like within infrastructural critique, but also what it means for Marina’s theory of infrastructural critique to move (to change, to develop) in her absence. For Marina, infrastructural critique was articulated at its most basic level as “a materialist theory of conditions.” The proposition, deliberately minimal and portable, was intended to make space for others to elaborate further paths of inquiry—paths for collaborative development but also for productive disagreement. Along these lines, Helmut Draxler, Marina’s predecessor in the Department of Art Theory at the University of Applied Arts, made a compelling case for the ongoing importance of institutional critique as operating at a diagrammatically higher level of abstraction than infrastructure, which Draxler described as a more empirical concept. The rationale for the argument was both practical and strategic. Draxler pointed out that the political right also undertakes the “abolition” of the liberal institution, with or without the assistance of infrastructural critique, with its focus on material struggles and its antipathy to the imperial underpinnings of European liberalism. In response, artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian offered a different perspective, both in the Q&A and indirectly in her own presentation: The post-genocidal “Year 0” of 2024, she suggested, discloses a reality of European cultural institutions from which there is no turning back. The dust and rubble of Gaza is a lesson that cannot be learned simply by diagramming different levels of theoretical engagement. Anchoring Sadr Haghighian’s presentation was a diagram of a different kind: a cartoon napkin-sketch made by Marina depicting the “radioactive ruin” of the bourgeois self as a deranged lollipop, squeezed between “rising waters” and descending “flames,” its only weapon the depleted keywords of “justice,” “freedom,” and “ethics.” This image would recur throughout the two main days of the event.
The topos of fire and flames—of entropic decay, genocidal erasure, and infrastructural collapse—ran like a red thread through the presentations by Rose-Anne Gush and Marwa Arsanios, as well as, in a more speculative register, Hannah Black’s. These focused on, respectively, problems of entropy and energy extraction; the “colonial mode of production” theorized by Mahdi Amel in connection with the Mashaa, a “Levantine form of collective land tenure and legal common”; and Marina’s critical but always curious engagement with the “Black anti-infrastructures” of Afro-pessimist thinking. Another recurring theme was the role of Marxist-feminist perspectives on reproduction in the critique of infrastructures, which connected Andreas Petrossiants’s theoretical discussion with Romana Schmalisch and Robert Schlicht’s artistic invention of a “labor power plant,” an imagined infrastructure grounding their long-term investigation into “real methods used in the unemployment industry.” A third focus, on questions of embodiment, situated Marina’s 2021 text “Bodies in Space” in relation to Mattin’s inquiries into noise as a desubjectifying form of negativity, and Taylor Le Melle’s attempt to mediate between the corporate structures of colonial land-grabbing and the annulment of bodily experience so often reproduced in the apparently oppositional institutions of European critical theory.
Certain aspects of Marina’s thinking came into new and surprising focus. Many of the conference participants talked about Marina’s theorization of gaps, an apparently marginal concept in her work first proposed in her writing on infrastructure in the art of Dora Budor. From Kerstin Schroedinger and Angela Melitopoulos’s work on railroads as “infrastructures of denial,” closing the gaps within the territory of the modern nation-state, to Kerstin Stakemeier’s insistence on gaps as “toxic solvents and jinxed keys” that, despite their radioactivity, may yet be capable of “originat[ing] revolutionary activity out of compromised forms (all forms),” the gap as something that needs to be cut or “carved out” (Endnotes) from the sphinx of capitalist infrastructures, rather than simply discovered in it ready-to-hand, or ready-made, expressed for many of the speakers a shared political horizon.
Marina left us in Year 0, remarked Sadr Haghighian in her presentation. We convened to speak about her life and work near the end of Year 1. We really do live in times in which the fascist right attacks liberal institutions, even as these liberal institutions really do provide ideological cover for genocide beyond the boundaries of the states and corporate entities that supply them with their conditions—their infrastructure. How a “materialist theory of conditions,” focused, as Marina argued, on “displacing the boundaries between production and … conditions,” can help us to make use of these brutalizing paradoxes rather than to become paralyzed by them is a question that, as Marina might also have said, cannot be answered in the abstract. And yet what most distinguished this celebration of her work was that its participants all found ways of answering in the concrete, not least by speaking about the ways in which her work moves through us. And the answer to how it does this, as Stakemeier argued, and as Maria Bussmann showed in her artistic presentation by quite different means, is inseparable from how we think about and practice love, meaning love for one another through the medium of those who are gone—the ones who, as Alberto Toscano argued, ventriloquizing Ruth Wilson Gilmore, we “select and reselect” as ancestors.
“What Is Infrastructural Critique?” served as a model of theoretical and political interpretation carried on in this spirit, as a way of thinking across theoretical and practical difference as well as time and space, “in love and fascination” and in recognition of the unpayable debt that we owe to the ones we have lost. We think that many of the people in the room felt this with us, that the feeling was general, and that as we attempted to speak about the life and the work of someone whom we loved, and about her own love for investigating the limits of both life and work, we also showed how the concepts themselves can be made to move, towards the demands of a present within which we must move, as Marina herself once wrote, because we are here and we are in it.
