Marcial Echenique (Architecture, University of Cambridge)

Civic Matter - 13 October 2014 - Re-Imagining the Sound of a Mining Landscape

Taking infrastructure in a narrow material sense, Civic Matter is about thinking through the social, ethical and political work of infrastructural design, (re)construction and maintenance, and the ways in which anticipated and obsolete infrastructures are imagined, remembered, destroyed, recycled or eschewed.  Our central aim is to explore the past and potential of infrastructure as a civic project through a combination of (inter)disciplinary angles, from architecture to archeology, geography to history. We plan to discuss the forms of labour and imagination that materialize past and future polities, and to identify the threats posed by neglect, exclusion, dysfunction and privatisation to this project, and the material effects –from immobility to toxic exposure—that infrastructural disenfranchisement might produce.
Infrastructure, it is said, is invisible until it breaks down.  Maybe more accurately, infrastructure is topical when it overflows the present; when destruction, disrepair or regime change make cables and pipes things of the past, or when the design of boulevards or dreams of electrification augur new destinies. As memory, history or futurity, infrastructure provokes reflection and debate on the ethos of utilities, communication, circulation and disposal. What kinds of collectives might sewers and subways bind? Should civic, market or paternalistic relations guide the shape, size and flow of infrastructural networks? How have metropolitan, national, imperial and cosmopolitan visions been materialized as railways and telecommunications? How do collapsing bridges and mismatched gauges expose political, technological and ethical failures, as well as the forms of long-term planning, care and repair required by socialism, welfare, capitalism or democracy? What political claims have infrastructural interruption and renovation evoked?