Mapping infrastructures of artistic practices

Part of Archipelago of Artistic Practices, a Research Summit organised by Jubilee and M HKA. The programme and exhibition are built around Eavatea, a digital infrastructure for mapping research-based and transdisciplinary practices. Archipelago of Artistic Practices take place in conjunction with M HKA’s major exhibition The Geopolitics of Infrastructure and includes the participation of many of its exhibiting artists.

Saturday 21 June 2025, 11-18h

Location: M HKA, 6th floor

Eavatea was originally conceived as a ‘mapping tool’ that could go beyond the strictly ‘georeferential’ conventions of cartography that claim objectivity while visualising certain information and obscuring other. The work of the 19th century anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus is still today inspiring in that respect. Many research practices, artistic and otherwise, are occupied precisely with unveiling the infrastructures that shape and reshape our understanding of the world and life that takes place in it.But on the other hand Eavatea is also proposing an alternative mode of operating. The installation of a tool that distributes transdisciplinary and research-based practices through a collective artistic engagement reflects how it can be used as a common and pluriverse infrastructure. Eavatea can thus become an agora within the broader arts field, a motor of encounters on- and offline, for setting up research communities and new forms of exchange.

 

Timetable

11h / Keynote: Élisée Reclus, Social Art and Cartography – Federico Ferretti (Professor of Geography , University of Bologna)

11:30 / Conversation with Federico Ferretti moderated by Vermeir & Heiremans

12:30 Lunch

13:30 / Keynote: Infrastructure as Diagrammatic Disposition: Fareed Armaly’s From/To (1999–2002) revisited – Sabeth Buchmann (Head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna)

14:15 / Conversation with Sabeth Buchmann moderated by Ronny Heiremans and Vincent Meessen

15:00 / Performance: Fermentation and Speculation in Art and Wild Ale – Bureau of Analogies (Tobias Van Royen & Scott William Raby)

16:30 / Keynote: Performing Infrastructure – Emily Rosamond (Senior Lecturer Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths London)

17:30 / Sound performance: Justin Bennett, An Infra-sonic Journey – sounding the infrastructure of Constant’s New Babylon – listening to utopian infrastructures – a parallel trip through Eavatea and New Babylon

 

Introductions on the keynotes

Elisée Reclus, Social Art and Cartography

Federico Ferretti

“The anarchist geographer Elisée Reclus considered that art should be socially engaged, and correspond to life and society itself rather than mere creation. As a part of his ethics of arts serving to embellish the world and transform society, he projected three-dimensional cartographic devices such as globes and raised reliefs as pedagogic representations of the world that tried to resolve the intrinsic problems of bidimensional maps. That is, according to anarchist geographers, maps lie, serving states, armies and dogmatic knowledges. Thus, alternative cartographies were also understood as social art”.

Activation Saturday 21 June 2025 – 11h

Federico Ferretti selected the first volume of Reclus’ L’Homme et la Terre as a contribution to the exposition Archipelago of Artistic Practices.  L’Homme et la Terre is a six-volume geohistorical encyclopedia, published posthumously between 1905 and 1908. Rich in maps and photographs, this first edition of the work is remarkable for the illustrations by František Kupka that appear at the beginning and end of each chapter.

Federico Ferretti is a full professor of geography at the University of Bologna and a former associate professor at University College Dublin. He specializes in historical and cultural geography, with a focus on anarchism, geopolitics and cartography.

 

Infrastructure as Diagrammatic Disposition: Fareed Armaly’s From/To (1999/ 2002) revisited

Sabeth Buchmann

With a view to Fareed Armaly’s position on the increasing censorship within German cultural politics Sabeth Buchmann will discuss the artist’s contribution to documenta 11 (2002) regarding the shifts within “dialogical transnational exchanges” (F.A.) since 1989, which the artist addresses in his letter of rejection of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize awarded to him in summer 2024. Based on an earlier reading of From/To as a diagrammatic space* that simultaneously materialises and abstracts infrastructures of cultural memory of the Palestinian diaspora, the lecture will also ask for the artistic and historiographic meaning of a trans-aesthetic retooling of collected and presented materials.

*in: Bassam El Baroni (ed.), Between the Material and the Possible. Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art, Berlin/ London: Sternberg Press and Edith Russ Haus, 2022.

Activation 21 June 2025 – 13:30h

Sabeth Buchmann chose to present Fareed Armaly’s rejection of the Käthe Kollwitz Prize 2025 awarded to him in summer 2024, as a contribution to the exhibition of Archipelago of Artistic Practices.

Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and art critic. She is currently Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art and the Head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She regularly contributes to books, magazines and catalogues. She is the author of Kunst als Infrastruktur (2023),  and was co-editor of Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetic, and Critique (2022), Die Stimme als Voice & Vote. Festschrift für Diedrich Diederichsen (2018); Putting Rehearsals to the Test. Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film. Theater, Theory, and Politics (2016).

 

Performing Infrastructure

Emily Rosamond

How do infrastructures consolidate power relations? How might counter-hegemonic infrastructures undergird resource distributions, relations, and collective actions in new ways – and what forms of thinking might support these pursuits? This lecture explores both the violence of infrastructure (when used as a tool for settler colonialism, resource extraction, and corporate domination) and its emancipatory potentials as a locus for activism and reactivation. It posits ‘performing infrastructure’ as a framework for thinking about infrastructure – as something that must ‘perform,’ and that is, in part, comprised of human actions – that foregrounds its participatory nature, and therefore brings its problems and potentials as a political tool into focus.

Activation Saturday 21 June 2025 – 16:30h

Emily Rosamond chose to write a poem, Hot Tub Hum, as her contribution to the exhibition Archipelago of Artistic Practices. It is about a hot tub at a David Lloyd gym. (David Lloyd is one of the brands in the private equity firm TDR Capital’s investment portfolio). The poem is a reading of the gym as relational infrastructure, against the grain of the private equity firm to whose portfolio it has been resigned.

Emily Rosamond is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. She serves as Editor of Finance and Society, Advisory Board member of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, and Director of Research for Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Her work explores how online platform infrastructures and financial investment protocols reshape reputation, character, and personality. Her forthcoming book, Reputation Warfare, explores online reputation as capitalist form.