Conference | Feminist Infrastructural Critique
Elke Krasny [Academy of Fine Arts Vienna]
Date: May 15, 2025, at 6:30 PM
Location: Aula Magna, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto

In this lecture, Elke Krasny presents Feminist Infrastructural Critique, a publication she co-edits with Sophie Lingg, bringing together a constellation of authors who critically examine the role of infrastructures in contemporary life from a feminist and intersectional perspective. The book gathers essays that challenge the technocratic and supposedly neutral conception of infrastructures, proposing instead a reading grounded in practices of care, social justice, and ecological responsibility. Combining theoretical inquiry, artistic practices, and situated experiences, the collection outlines an emerging field of infrastructural critique that recognizes technical, institutional, and urban systems as sites of contestation, violence, and also political imagination.

The lecture is part of the Glosar series, a critical reading and commentary practice that questions the transparency of texts and invites the construction of thought from the margins, reinventing the gesture of the glosa as a critical activity. The series proposes the exercise of glossing operative concepts and terms within contemporary artistic, spatial, and curatorial practices.

This event is also part of the visit of the Ecologies of Care network to Porto (May 15–17, 2025), invited by Inês Moreira (CEAA-ESAP). Created by Elke Krasny (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna) and Urska Jurman (Igor Zabel Association), the network includes artists, curators and researchers from several European countries and is dedicated to observing sites and infrastructures under pressure where artistic and civic collectives operate. After Ljubljana, Brussels and Athens, the visit to Porto includes meetings at ESAP, fieldwork at the Leça refinery, as well as activities with partners Bikini Books, Tour Feminista and a conference at FBAUP.

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Elke Krasny is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship addresses ecological and social justice in the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, curatorial work, and contemporary art. Together with Urška Jurman she initiated Ecologies of Care in 2021. With Angelika Fitz, Krasny edited Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (MIT Press, 2019), and with Angelika Fitz and Marvi Mazhar she edited Yasmeen Lari: Architecture for the Future (MIT Press, 2023). The volume Curating with Care, edited with Lara Perry (Routledge, 2023), brings together curatorial work that responds to and counteracts social and ecological crises of care. Her book Living with an Infected Planet: Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care develops a feminist perspective on the rhetoric of war and the realities of care in times of pandemic (transcript, 2023). Elke Krasny is a Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
https://www.elkekrasny.at/

Organization: i2ADS/FBAUP; CEAA/ESAP
In partnership with: Ecologies of Care
Support: REIT UP/CGD; FCT

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Inês Moreira [CEAA-ESAP]
Tiago Assis [i2ADS/FBAUP]
Paula Guerra [IS-UP/FLUP]
Lais Rabello [i2ADS/FBAUP-FCT]
Beatriz Duarte [i2ADS/FBAUP-FCT]