TITLE: 'Counter-Infrastructures.
AUTHOR: paula roush
MEDIUM: Entry for the online glossary
PUBLICATION: Institution(ing)s.
Eds. Cindy Sissokho and Luísa Santos. Forthcoming 2026.
Entry text:
Counter-Infrastructures name emergent practices that operate alongside, beneath, and across existing institutions, without seeking to replace them or to stabilise as new authoritative forms. They arise from lived conditions of precarity, care, and interdependence, and work by redistributing attention, resources, and responsibility where institutional infrastructures extract, exclude, or fail.
Counter-Infrastructures begin from the recognition of Living as Infrastructure: the understanding that life itself — bodies, time, affect, care, presence — already sustains cultural and institutional systems, often invisibly and at great cost. Rather than continuing to exhaust this condition, counter-infrastructural practices seek to acknowledge, protect, and re-organise it, making visible the labour that holds things together.
One way Counter-Infrastructures take form is through a Portable Infrastructure: an infra-institutional structure that moves through publications, tables, walks, archives, workshops, and situated encounters. This portable infrastructure does not accumulate permanence, authority, or scale. Instead, it assembles temporary conditions for thinking, learning, and caring together, adapting to context and dissolving once its task is complete.
As a methodology of action, Counter-Infrastructures are editorial, pedagogical, and relational. They privilege slowness over acceleration, continuity over productivity, and maintenance over innovation. They operate through proximity, listening, and repetition rather than spectacle or growth. Publishing becomes an expanded spatial practice; mediation becomes an ethics of care; research becomes relation rather than extraction.
Counter-Infrastructures do not offer a finished model or a blueprint for reform. They function as speculative and situated tools — rehearsals for institutions-to-come — held open through practice, iteration, and collective responsibility. They inhabit the present while gesturing toward an otherwise: not a distant utopia, but a livable future imagined from within shared conditions of vulnerability and care.
Image: counter-infrastructures_msdm_table-archive_Siegen.jpg
Medium: Composite image assembling four documentation photographs of a table-archive installation and editorial workshop, forming a single visual language.
Caption: paula roush/ msdm mobile strategies of display & mediation, archive-table installation (2007–ongoing. Installation and infra-institutional publishing framework presented at Dear Aby Warburg: What Can Be Done with Images? Dealing with Photographic Material, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 2012–2013
Description: This installation took the form of a grassroots archive-table, conceived as a working interface rather than a display. Inspired by queer and feminist vernacular archives encountered in London—particularly the Hall–Carpenter Archives and the Feminist Library—the project explored archival practice as a lived, relational infrastructure. Using standardised shelving units and archival cardboard boxes sourced from commercial suppliers, the installation deliberately adopted institutional materials while reorienting their function. The archive housed not only the Found Photo Foundation’s raw materials—found photographs, family albums, photobooks, postcards, printed ephemera, and instructional documents—but also their ongoing reactivation through publishing, workshops, and collective handling.
Rather than stabilising meaning or authorship, the archive-table operated as an infra-institutional structure: a space where boundaries between archive and everyday life remained porous, and where images circulated through touch, conversation, and recomposition. The table functioned simultaneously as storage, editing surface, pedagogical tool, and site of encounter—foregrounding mediation as a practice of care and participation.
The archive-table established a mode of working that continues to inform msdm’s infra-institutional publishing, pedagogical protocols, and counter-infrastructural practices.
This work is discussed in Chaos of Memories: Surviving Archives and the Ruins of History According to the Found Photo Foundation, in Order and Collapse: The Lives of Archives, edited by Gunilla Knape, Louise Wolthers, and Niclas Östlind (Art and Theory Publishing / Hasselblad Foundation, 2016).