Disrupted Infrastructures

Hosts: Jonas Leifert (Essen), Rika Sakalak (Bochum)

Chair: Jörn Etzold (Bochum)

Speakers: Ivana Rumanová (Bratislava), Maria Esperanza Rock Nuñez (Bochum, Concepción), Britta Peters (Bochum)

The social fabric of societies undergoing deindustrialisation can be understood as disrupted infrastructure, accompanied by the rise of neoliberal techniques of governance and subjectivation. Taking the Ruhr region, Chile and Eastern/Central Europe as case studies, this panel explores the role of art institutions in these processes, examining how comparable yet distinct experiences of deindustrialisation resonate with the current resurgence of militarisation, nostalgia and authoritarianism.

Chair: Tomaz Amorim (São Paulo, Bochum)

Speakers: Cecilia Nuria Gil Mariño (Buenos Aires, Köln), Lívia de Souza Lima (Regensburg)

This panel examines how historically marginalized communities transform urban space into infrastructures of political imagination, collective survival, and alternative futures. Rather than treating the city as a neutral setting or understanding refuge as protection from violence, the panel explores refuge as an active political practice through which spaces are reclaimed, meanings are reworked, and new forms of collective life become possible.

Chair: Leon Gabriel (Bochum)

Speakers: NN, NN

This panel explores the dynamics of retreat considering the emergence of counter-communities. It critically examines how public spheres and counter-publics are formed and transformed, and how the (fictional) boundaries between public and private domains can be shifted. The panel delves into the withdrawal from a public that is allegedly ‚open to all‘. Thus, the normative questions of accessibility, visibility, participation, and exclusion are being discussed as well as forms of protest and assembly as expressions of these negotiations.

Hannah Göbel (Hamburg)

Institut für Widerstand im Postfordismus / Elisa Müller (Berlin)

Chair: Gerko Egert (Bochum)

Speakers: Sebastian Randerath (Bonn), Kathrin Ebmeier (Bochum, Köln), Elisa Müller (Berlin), NN

Industrial infrastructures do more than extract resources, organize labor, and generate profit: they shape the ways we live, work, and come together. In the Ruhr, mines, factories, and railways have produced not only coal and steel, but also communities, collective imaginaries, and resistance. This panel asks: What traces of these struggles remain, and how might they inspire new forms of collectivity today?

Chair: Gwendolin Lehnerer (Kassel, Salzburg)

Speakers: Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski (Skopje), NN

In the cultural sector, personnel infrastructure often translates into care, solidarity, and mutual support – terms that carry exhaustion and fatigue along with them. How much relational labour can be given before it tips over? Has care itself become carewashing – a rhetoric that masks missing infrastructures such as money and time, thereby sustaining precarity rather than addressing it? And what role do public retreats play, in this sense, as curatorial practice?

Chair: Ruth Schmidt (Bochum)

The closing session brings together participants, speakers, and guests to reflect on the conversations, questions, and perspectives that have emerged throughout the program. Rather than offering conclusions, it opens space to revisit key themes, identify resonances across different contexts, and consider how the discussions might extend beyond the symposium.

Complementing the symposium programme, a curatorial tour of the exhibition Uncanny Shifts by Urbane Künste Ruhr invites participants to explore questions of disrupted infrastructures, societal transformation, and the renegotiation of public space through the lens of contemporary art. The exhibition offers artistic perspectives on uncertainty, change, and collective futures, extending the symposium’s discussions into the exhibition space.

Fri 02.10. 10:00-13:00

Ev. Stadtkirche Sankt Petri

Petrikirchhof 1, 44137 Dortmund

As an intimate workshop format, this session brings together participants with four international guests. Through short inputs and individual conversations, Biljana Tanurovska-Kjulavkovski, Andreas Liebmann, Filip Pawlak, and Kha Villanueva connect their practices in curatorial work, performance, urban research, and cultural activism to questions of disrupted infrastructures, public space, and democratic reorganisation. The focus lies on building personal networks and deepening individual research interests within the broader themes of the symposium.

Fri 02.10. 14:00-19:00

Hans A

Hansastraße 6-10, 44137 Dortmund