Taipei Biennial 2012

The Museum of the Infrastructural Unconscious inserts itself amidst the shifting relations between the form of contemporary polities and sovereignties, and the form of their material spaces of operation. It sets out an inquiry into the models to govern, order, affect and structure change by measuring, surveying, quantifying, evaluating, connecting and linking. At the juncture between two trajectories of institutional and spatial transformation, the museum phathoms two sets of archives and their conceptualisation of the connections between surveying, documenting and envisioning change and history.

On one hand, sectoral and expert knowledges have invested infrastructure discourses and practices, and driven the fragmentation and separation of its many technical know-hows. Separations in knowhows and delimitations of fields of influence have been translated directly into demarcations and separations in space, with the result of a variety of deterministic approaches to change now dominating the horizon. The expansion of the horizon of intervention, the scale and limits where to conceptualise and affect change, seemto link up to the imperial sweep of modernity.

On the other hand, at the side of these practices of delimitation and ordering processes, thrusts of disalignment and de-organisation are appearing on all sides. At odds with the mainstay equivalence be­­­tween transformation processes and organisational procedures and protocols, a series of fissures, fragments, fault-lines are reshaping contemporary space of inhabitation. Rather than the unwanted, the disaligned, the left-overs, these spaces appear to mark divergent and syncopated paths of devel­opment. A number of seemingly non-connected events, projects and initiatives are beginning to ask how to step out of predefined orientation schemes, where politics, spaces, technologies, images and texts need not to be associated along lines inscribed in previous knowledge.

(Territorial Agency / John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog)