• Funding providers: DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft)
• Duration: 2025 bis 2029
• Spokesperson: Prof. Dr. Jörn Etzold
• Coordination: Dr. des. Ruth Schmidt

The research group ‘Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply,’ based at Ruhr University Bochum and the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, will receive funding from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for four years starting on 1 October 2025.

Infrastructures ensure the supply of life. This creates not only technological-administrative realities, but complex webs of social and cultural interdependencies. The group assembles researchers from theater studies, literary studies, media studies, and political philosophy to inquire into the specific forms of these interdependencies and into alternative infrastructural practices. Their research is based on a dual concept of infrastructure: as the material basis of coexistence in the form of roads, railways or water pipes and as the implicit formation of perception and action. Conceptually, the focus is on an aspect that has been neglected so far: the aesthetics of infrastructure. Aesthetic criteria prefigure what appears to be desirable and feasible in terms of infrastructure; in doing so, they shape coexistence with and through infrastructures - which in turn determine what can be experienced by whom. In analyzing artistic works and socio-cultural processes from the fields of theater/performance, literature, film and media art, the group aims to expand previous infrastructure research, which is oriented towards questions of technology and administration, to include a perspective that reflects infrastructure as a social ordering force and makes it negotiable. With newly recruited researchers from Brazil, Germany, Great Britain, Zimbabwe, Slovakia and Spain, the group will examine in particular the past and continued existence of heavy industrial, colonial, racialising and extractivist infrastructure. Spokesperson is Jörn Etzold, based at the Departement for Theatre Studies.

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