Records of Disaster. Infrastructures and material witnesses of climate change

Workshop

April 29, 2022, 1:00 p.m. – April 30, 2022, 4:00 p.m.

While infrastructures form the seemingly stable material and logistical basis of our everyday lives, on closer inspection they are fragile constructs. This is made clear by the regular collapse of networks that supply people with water, heat, goods and information. Increasingly, such collapses are triggered by ecological disasters, forest fires, floods or tidal waves, which at the same time act as material witnesses to global warming and sensitize us to man-made climate change and its local effects.

The workshop questions the role of infrastructures in and for man-made climate change from an artistic and scientific perspective and at the same time looks at them as its material witnesses. How can the infrastructural interplay of political, material and ecological factors be analyzed? What sensory, technological and legal forms of translation and mediation determine these entanglements and to what extent are they addressed – or deliberately omitted – in science and art? What approaches can be used to address places and histories of invisible work and neglected practices of care? What interactions, but also tensions and interruptions are negotiated in infrastructures, what conflicting forces are they exposed to? And in what ways are people, non-people, materials and things connected or separated by them?

An event of the Carl von Ossietzky – University of Oldenburg, Institute for Art and Visual Culture.