Infrahauntologies Part II

Infrahauntologies is a program international group exhibition in two parts at La Box foregrounding recent practices that engage with questions of infrastructure.

The predominance of certain outlooks on the world versus others is partly due to their embeddedness in and diffusion through the systems, technologies, and infrastructures of the built environment. For this reason, a recent pushback against the popular idea that we are destined to live in some sort of eternal present—with no recourse to shaping a different and more equitable future—has looked to infrastructure as a medium of innovation that might suggest otherwise. In an attempt to counter the impasse of “the canceled future,” art has immersed itself in formulating speculative models and propositional thinking around systems and infrastructures, and from this position attempts to address major challenges such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change.

A key question explored by several works in Infrahauntologies is: How can financialization and computation be leveraged to generate fairer conditions and to reopen foreclosed possibilities? While some existing infrastructures are haunted by historical and political legacies, others may be haunted by an excess of speculation on the future—the material traces and imprints of gambles that both did and did not pay off.

Through the exhibited video and installation works, Infrahauntologies highlights some recurring tendencies within the field of art related to working with infrastructural histories, counter-speculating on infrastructural futures, and embracing fiction as key to supervening upon hegemonic infrastructural nexuses. These overlapping tendencies can be identified as “infrastructural speculation” and “infrastructural re-examination.” In the first, artistic competencies are channeled toward transformative infrastructural scenarios, based on the imaginative rerouting of possibilities dormant in current technologies. In the second, artists revisit the legacies of ill-fated megaprojects, with the aim to identify their aspirations, models, and problems and to use these as pathways for learning from collapse.