A brief exchange and many more
I did not get to know Marina personally; however, one of the few times I met her was on March 15, 2024, when I had a screening in Vienna at the Artist's Space School, run by Yasmina Haddad and Andrea Lumplecker. For the whole three hours of the screening and the conversation on March 15, I wondered what Marina thought of films that were dealing with land reappropriation, organizing the struggle for de-privatization or communalization of land, the masha'a (a Levantine form of common land), an infrastructure of non-property or infrastructures that allow for another relationship to land. What can film do in relation to those infrastructures that were already in place? What can film add to that which exceeds film, like an organization for legally reverting a land from private property to masha'a, a common? Why film? Or is it an infrastructure of its own? In the same way that critique is one, to follow Marina's words:
we also need to turn the question around, to ask whether the discursive and philosophical notion of critique, which has been justifiably queried from so many perspectives over the recent period, can itself be a 'critical infrastructure' for how organizational and political change happens in the space of art, where critique is so often treated as the property of a Eurocentric 'modernism'.
I was eager to talk to her more about this and many other things. I wanted to talk to her about how infrastructures that produce non-property can possibly contaminate and flood the art economy and potentially shift or abolish the artist as entrepreneur. Perhaps a naïve and optimistic sentiment. I also wanted to think through with her abolition in Ruthie Wilson Gilmore's understanding: that is, not a void or an absence but a practice of organizing against an infrastructure of neglect, more specifically in relation to the question of property, which was at the center of our discussion that evening. How to produce the hole or the cut in the infrastructure through a practice of organizing otherwise. What about film again? I was keen for this conversation to happen on the way out. We ended up standing outside exchanging a few words and then vanishing.
Since Marina's passing, I often think about that night and the conversation that did not happen. But in a way it did happen long ago, when in 2016 I first came across her work on infrastructural critique, "Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Toward Infrastructural Critique," published in the compilation Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989. Back then, I was still co-running a project space in Beirut called 98weeks that specifically thought about how to put into practice feminist politics with particular attention to social reproduction and the labor that produces the art organization, as well as the temporality of research processes, as the name indicates. That year, we were organizing a conference with Sidsel Nelund on work and the reproductive labor of the institution.
Perhaps we were not aware of the fact that building a structure as artists and for artists was in itself a critique of existing institutions and their functioning, a reorganization of work and processes of production—and a building of possibilities to experiment with different collective research methodologies, studying and organizing together. We were self-organizing as there was a necessity for the creation of a space to be together, read, research, look at films, and more. It was about the organization of the social around a space that in itself is inherently connected to a wider infrastructure that I will talk about shortly.
In the intervals between our work on feminism, social reproduction, the city, its accelerated neoliberalization, and the invasion of global capital since the 1990s, we received small grants from international foundations to be able to pay the running costs of the space that did open for possibilities, but also foreclosed others, as we were part of the intense gentrification of the city. We soon comprehended our economic entanglement with an international funding economy—however minimal—which does not reduce what we were doing, but foresees its limitation.
The end of the 1990s and the 2000s saw a program in the arts that was funded by the Ford Foundation for a bigger chunk, and by other international foundations such as the Open Society Institute, the European Union, and more, whose aim was to develop cultural and artistic institutions in the region. These were directly linked to an international US or European funding system that has a specific agenda focused on institutional building in the Middle East. The project of reinforcing the cultural scene—and to a certain extent infiltrating it—was in accordance with US foreign administrations' policies and politics in the Middle East, which aimed at taming any leftist resistance and Islamization in its different strands, perceived as the main force producing anti-US sentiment.
Historically, the aim was also to obstruct any real communist or socialist organizing—which was in any case later fizzling away and weakening at the dawn of the 1990s, as the brutal neoliberal bulldozer of the post-civil war reconstruction era attempted and did its best to crush parties, unions, and the last remains of leftist organization. Construction was the dominant soundscape of the city. And many other "buildings" came along. "Capacity building" or "institutional building" had a purpose and a consequence: the separation of culture from political movements. It looked as though political and economic transition and cultural production would become part of a wider NGO economic complex, and a segment of continued imperial hegemony in the region, with its cultural diplomacy. Just to give a comparative example: up until 1982, a lot of the political art, film, music, theater, and literature were funded by the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) or the LCP (Lebanese Communist Party), so as a matter of fact, in this new economy, culture was separated from any ongoing anti-colonial liberation movement and resistance. In the wake of this moment of posts—post-Soviet, post-Oslo, and post-Taef (end of the Lebanese civil war)—anti-colonial struggles and revolutionary movements were tamed or pushed to the background, and often transformed into relics and discourses in the cultural sphere, or mere objects of study (which we did study at 98weeks as well).
Three decades later, we see a completely new institutional landscape. What had started in the 1990s with theater makers, artists, journalists, writers, political militants, and others working together, self-organizing and producing thought through their different mediums and collectively, ended up as fully fledged institutions that resembled, at least on the surface, Western models of contemporary art institutions and museums. It undeniably produced a particular neoliberal institution that acts as a symptom of the economy—one that diffuses the inherent tension between arts and politics in fear of losing funders (except a few), or separates arts from politics when needed, with the excuse of privileging so-called artistic autonomy.
This does not reduce either practices or institutions to a mere product of the given economic and political contingencies, and more importantly, these were the material conditions of the moment, as many people repurposed the means very intelligently and certainly did not obey funders—quite the opposite. Nevertheless, the policies and economic dependencies reorganized cultural work and disciplined the ground in a literal sense: the separation of disciplines and division of labor. And by no means do I intend to fall into a reactionary, rigidified anti-imperialism that praises cultural authenticity, but I would not deny the cultural erasure and erosion that these 1990s liberal policies led to. In that sense, they steered the separation of visual art—and what was to become contemporary art—from other cultural productions, connecting it to the global art economy. International funding was the sole financing in light of the non-existent local or public funding structures. After 2013, there was a prominent local philanthropic turn.
Infrastructural Critique and the Colonial Mode of Production
So that era and transition to a neoliberal economy did lead to a redefinition of culture, whose means of production were—if we use Mahdi Amel's concept—solely tied to a colonial mode of production facilitated by a national elite or comprador bourgeoisie, following his theoretical and philosophical articulation. Separated from resistance and anti-colonial struggles.
The CMP insists on the continuation and persistence of the colonial relations of production on a structural level after so-called independence. For Amel, liberation can only come from the working classes that organize towards a socialist revolution. This would be the only path to break with—or in Marina's words, to produce—a cut:
but a critique that makes cuts and lets in air, a critique that takes it upon itself to find or make the holes through which this infrastructure comes into view. And maybe these holes, whether incised by art or political organizing, can be extended to enable a grasping and a torsion to be exercised on those conditions, tugging them into really completely different shapes if necessary, demolishing or abolishing them if not?
A cut produced through the reorganization of work or the organization of art workers. And ultimately, a cut in the structure of the colonial mode of production. A cut or a disjunction between the colonial and its mode of production. For Marina, and in her own words:
In the general project of infrastructural critique, much of the work I have been doing over the years has been related to displacing the boundaries between production and its conditions.
I am trying to think this displacement of boundaries through the specificity of the colonial mode of production, which is distinct from Fanon's neocolonialism or Samir Amin's dependency theory, as the continuation of the colonial relation can neither be ruptured by the subject and consciousness nor through a mere economic or cultural untying from the center, or the metropole, but through class struggle that will lead to a temporal rupture in the mode of production. So perhaps if we want to think about it from the prism of art, a reorganization of art workers would produce this cut—which is a temporal movement, as Nadia Bou Ali writes in her paper "Mahdi Amel's Colonial Mode of Production and Politics in the Last Instance":
Amel does not conceptualize the CMP in spatial terms: the CMP is not a "colonized space" but is characterized primarily by its specific temporality, which is that of an impeded history. Amel proposes that the CMP is a contingency turned into necessity because of its specific historical dynamic of "eternal repetition of essence" in colonial societies. This encounter or conjunction creates different rhythms; it is neither continuous nor discontinuous with the past and it introduces a new temporality into the social whole. This is why the question of the historical or history became the central concern of Amel's formulation of the CMP. He argues that the overcoming of the CMP requires an adequate understanding of the specificity of class struggle in this social formation: "The periodization of history was not simply the result of the movement of modes of production, but was the result of the tempo and movement of class struggle."
So, for Amel, the colonial mode of production is resisted or fought against through the temporal movement of class struggle. Crucially, for Amel, colonialism not only shapes the economy but also organizes the intellectual field, producing what he calls the colonial intelligentsia: local elites who mediate between global and local circuits of power. Their role is to reproduce colonial ideology, often through the appropriation of discourses of development, liberal democracy, and freedom of art. Thus, educational and cultural infrastructures are in and of themselves sites of struggle. And in that sense, artists and cultural workers organizing their work—refusing, resisting, speculating, repurposing—is what will break down and crack open the historical and political specificities of the infrastructure of coloniality, ultimately aiming for its disruption and abolition. Referring back to Ruthie Gilmore's understanding of abolition as a practice of organizing, following Marina:
An organizational rather than thematic appropriation of the labor in art, I would argue, is the only way that a negative critique of autonomy can be initiated by using the institutional and infrastructural resources of that autonomy, allowing it to transversally connect with and through movements elsewhere, and to materialize those movements within the space of art as a concrete rather than gestural politics.
Such as the work of grassroots Palestine, the question of funding, Eltiqa in Gaza—whose space has indeed been razed to the ground—these formations and spaces aim at an economic liberation of sorts. While keeping in mind that infrastructures of coloniality are, in and of themselves, unstable, in movement, prone to change, and in a constant dialectical relation with resistance and struggle.
Building in the Cut Between the Colonial and Its Mode of Production: Another Infrastructure, One of Non-Property
And here I wonder to what extent a strategy of repurposing is still a feasible one in a post-October 7th order. As we have watched—and are still watching—infrastructures being razed to the ground while people are genocided by Zionist forces in Gaza, and land grabs and wars continue in the region (and I will refrain from using terms such as scholasticide, epistemicide, and ecocide, but rather speak of a general obliteration of the most basic and necessary infrastructures for the social reproduction of life—from the kitchen, to the home, to the school, to the hospital—as Mai Taha develops in her article "Social Reproduction as Survival and Insurgency in Gaza"). As we also watch the continued war on Lebanon, especially the South, the Bekaa, and Beirut, targeting means of reconstruction such as bulldozer machines, destroying agricultural land and aiming at prohibiting people from rebuilding, reinhabiting their homes and villages, working their land, and reproducing their lives in the southern villages. Instead, we are bombarded with 3D renderings of real estate fantasies and settlers' projections of a Riviera, with war criminals such as Tony Blair appointed at the head of a so-called supervisory peace council—which brings back a pastiche of the British Mandate era, except that this time it is set inside the settler colony. A mandate inside the settler colony, led and financed by real estate developers, along with projects of a duty-free economic zone in the border region of South Lebanon.
Within this order, the cut in the colonial mode of production comes with cutting ties, withdrawing, and finding a new space from which to start organizing and building the negation of the artist as entrepreneur. Like the most recent refusal of artists and artist-run spaces in Beirut and the larger region to accept funding from, for example, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, as per their genocide denialism; the boycott of the Goethe-Institut and other German and US foundations; or even returning already cashed grants.
The persistent question is how to build in that space of the cut between the colonial and its mode of production—or more precisely, how to build this cut against the fantasized 3D real estate renderings projected on the rubble of annihilation and destruction.
This infrastructure emerges from an obstinate and insistent relation to land against colonial land grab, and where counter-speculation to the real estate fantasies takes shape. Insisting on a different property relation and a history of it—such as the masha'a, which disrupts financial speculation and cuts through the colonial land registrar in the depths of its bureaucracy. A cut through the seemingly naturalized and unshakable private property law that organizes it. A hole in the document from the French National Archives in Nantes titled "Instruction on the Dismemberment of Musha' Land" by Camille Duraffourd, a French Mandate officer deployed to Syria and Lebanon (circa 1925), that reveals the ideological agenda which deemed the masha'a an unproductive system and brought about the compulsory partitioning among co-owners of the masha'a.
The remains of the masha'a—not as a practice of communally tending the land but as a legal status for the commons (a status that exists in Lebanon and is inherited from the Ottoman land code)—is an antidote to the persistence and reproduction of the colonial mode of production, not only producing a temporal rupture as per Amel but also a spatial one, as it concerns land, its parceling, and legal status.
We see practices of the masha'a re-emerging in the Levantine space. Similar to an experiment that I have been part of, which involves legally transforming a land into a masha'a or a common in the North of Lebanon. Once we delved into the bureaucracy of the land registrar, we ended up freezing the land and transforming it into a social waqf, which renders it non-transmittable, non-sellable, and non-exchangeable, so prohibiting any form of transaction. We were keen on creating a legal precedent of sorts, intervening in the gaps of the law, so to speak. A reverse movement towards a history of a complex agricultural system and communal land tenure. Perhaps the masha'a is a form of infrastructural critique of the colonial mode of production, sitting in the land registrar and waiting to take a new shape.
And it is shaping and re-emerging within Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. As Faiq Mari writes in his thesis "Masha' of the Periphery: Collective Labor and Property in Palestinian Liberation Struggle," mapping the different agricultural cooperatives in the West Bank. Or the infrastructures of cooperatives and communes in the North of Syria built on public land after 2013 in the self-governed Kurdish region.
Perhaps an infrastructural critique of the colonial mode of production is embedded and inherent in the land registrar apparatus itself. It is another history of property that does not disappear but re-emerges in moments when there is a breakdown in the naturalized order of the private property regime, creating a temporal and spatial rupture in the property relation—whether through the law or outside of it—and therefore in the mode of production.
So on that evening of March 15, we were already different artists, different art workers, and cultural workers in relation to the institution; we were different humans or different political animals. That evening, we were not ourselves; we were a collapsed structure we had learned to function in and with. We were the collapsed structures of the liberal status quo that was crumbling in all its apparatuses and cultural institutions. The institution had revealed its incapacity in refusing the Staatsräson. Excuses ranged from "let's do art, not politics" to "let's protect the space of art as an autonomous space for thinking" to "let's decolonize poetically" or "poetry is our language, we are not activists." The political event that is a flood in the infrastructure that produces the institution rifts the institution and breaks open its own inner structure.
That conversation with Marina had started long before it did not occurred that night in Vienna on March 15, and continues towards infrastructures of insurgency and liberation from the colonial order—away from cultural diplomacy and its neoliberal order, the colonial mandate and its civilizing mission, and settler colonialism and its genocide.
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This contribution was first presented in the frame of the conference "What Is Infrastructural Critique?” co-organized by KKP (Sofia Bempeza and Annette Krauss) together with Danny Hayward and Rose-Anne Gush, and hosted at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, in October 2025.
- Cover Image:
Mariuccia Secol, The Scream (Il Grido), 1971. © Mariuccia Secol. Courtesy of the artist’s family. Photo: Magdalena Typiak
