Power Up. Technical Imaginaries and Social Utopias

Power Up. Technical Imaginaries and Social Utopias
(Power Up. Imaginaires techniques et utopies sociales)

Edited by Géraldine Gourbe and Fanny Lopez

Published in the wake of the exhibitions Power Up. Technical Imaginaries and Social Utopias, presented at Le Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire and at the Kunsthalle in Mulhouse in 2024, this book extends a collective reflection on infrastructure, its representations, and the forms of society it makes possible.

Infrastructure organizes the circulation of energy, materials, information, and living things. Often invisible, buried in the soil, in the oceans, or within the technical networks that cross our territories, it nonetheless constitutes the indispensable backdrop of our societies. But before being an assemblage of technical devices, infrastructure is also a political, economic, and social order.

Edited by Géraldine Gourbe and Fanny Lopez, Power Up explores this dimension through a meeting of art, the history of technology, and critical reflection. The contributions bring together historians of architecture, the environment, and technology, alongside philosophers, political scientists, journalists, activists, and artists, all engaged with a shared question: what do infrastructures reveal about the forms of power that structure our contemporary societies?

Texts, archival documents, exhibition views, and artworks enter into dialogue, interrogating both the representations of infrastructure worlds and their material reality. A collective volume that invites us to look anew at what supports, connects, and conditions our ways of life.

Featuring

Authors: Paul Bouet, Isabelle Cambourakis, Alice Carabédian, Sophie Desgeorges, Catherine Geel, Géraldine Gourbe, Marie Lechner, Sophie Legrandjacques, Fanny Lopez, Anaël Marrec, Cara New Daggett, Raymond Schirmer, and Sandrine Wymann

Artists: Carla Adra, Jeanne Marie and Georges Alexandroff, Marielle Chabal, Marjolijn Dijkman, Jacques Dommée, Yona Friedman, Hilary Galbreaith, Véronique Joumard, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Laura Lamiel, Le Corbusier, Basim Magdy, Maya Mihindou, Lou Masduraud, Jürgen Nefzger, Gina Pane, Claude Parent, Jean Picart Le Doux, Tatiana Trouvé, Suzanne Triester, and Charlotte Vinouz

T&P publishing
11×18 cm, 352 pages, illustrated
ISBN: 9791095513247

Distributed by: Interart, Paris, FR