Martina Bofulin and Igor Rogelja
Human beings generate lines whenever they go (Ingold 2007), but some of these lines seem to reach beyond the limits of the human experience. Infrastructure – built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space – has been integral to our understanding of modernity and progress and often elevated to a symbol of human mastery, inscribing the dreams and the desired futures of individuals and societies. Their peculiar ontology, writes Brian Larkin, is that they are things and also the relations between things. They are simultaneously present to the senses but also displaced in the focus on a matter they move around (Larkin 2013: 329). The infrastructure thus ranges from hypervisibility highlighted in the grandeur and spectacle, to invisibility – taken for granted and seen only upon breakdown (Star 1999).
By employing walking as a methodology, we rethink the scales, function, and affect generated by the infrastructure through an embodied experience that defies their utility. Walking allows us to go beyond the intended use of infrastructure and to delve into the deeper logic of humans’ attempts to control time and space and the underlying mechanisms of government and governmentality. Wandering along train lines, under viaducts, alongside port terminals, amid electricity poles and stacked highways we can reflect on infrastructure’s embeddedness in space but also their role in what is now popularly known as “global connectivity” challenging the planners’ intentions and our enchantments of speed and convenience that inform the conventional understanding of modernity. Rather, we critically address the positivist notion of infrastructure connecting places and things and ask what kind of connections infrastructure entails, but also which places and people are linked or isolated by it.