I co-wrote an essay with artist Alina Lupu for Kunstlicht vol.44 nr.4: Between the Standing and the Inclined: Structures Supporting Change in which we contextualise one of her recent socially-engaged artistic projects titled The Artist as Public Servant within the notion of infrastructural critique, which emerged relatively recently in contemporary art theory and is considered a successor to 1960s and 70s institutional critique. As I explain in the foreword to our piece:
When I read the call for papers for this issue, I knew I had to rope Alina into it somehow. At that time, she had just orchestrated a spontaneous sit-in at Rotterdam Central Station to lament the hasty removal of public benches from the main hall. I did not know her personally, but I had been following her on Instagram for quite some time (and that counts for something, right?). So I slid into her DMs, we met up for a drink soon after, passed the vibe check, and embarked on a process of negotiation and exchanging thoughts, reading material, anecdotes, and jokes in the margins of our shared Google doc, which eventually transpired into this essay.
In this paper, we riff off leftist memes, refer to some of our favourite artistic works from the institutional critique movement, and reveal how you can embark on subtle schemes to derail funds (which are by no means a structural solution) in order to enact a ‘cut’ in the overarching infrastructure of funding bodies and sectoral budgets.
As an author, I encourage you to purchase the issue so that you can read our essay and hopefully get some inspiration from it. As an editor, I urge you to do so in order to support the writers and the editors, who all put in a tremendous amount of time and energy, and do this voluntarily. Within the framework of this issue’s theme, the publication functions as a support. It is a very tender and kind issue exploring the role of companionship, friendship, and being present, among other things, as forms of support and as essential building blocks of structures supporting change. And you might also want to follow Alina’s superb and relentless work on Instagram.
Manuela Zammit 