Marcela Antipán Olate
Moving Infrastructures
On Navigation Systems and the Politics of Territorial and Bodily Control
Image taken from mallecoescultura.cl
How do navigation instruments function as infrastructures of control over territories and bodies, particularly within colonial and post-colonial contexts? In which ways can the infrastructures that sustain daily life and provide movement, be moved themselves?
This artistic research investigates navigation systems as infrastructures that not only make movement possible but also regulate how bodies and territories are oriented. Navigation instruments—from maritime devices to today’s digital mapping technologies—carry specific ways of knowing and controlling space. I approach them as moving infrastructures: technical objects that seem stable, yet are bound up with histories of displacement, colonial expansion, and the regulation of bodies.
The project explores how we orient ourselves in space and asks what happens when infrastructure itself—normally enabling but also constraining movement—is put into motion. Through performance, writing, and embodied engagement with the Malleco Region in Chile, I question inherited logics of navigation and orientation, exposing their political and cultural dimensions.
The research stages artistic experiments that unsettle infrastructures, twisting their functions into moments of disorientation and alternative orientation. In doing so, it contributes to artistic research by proposing performance not as representation, but as a method for testing how infrastructures might shift, bend, or fracture—and how new forms of spatial and artistic practice can emerge from that process.
This research is supervised by Prof. Dr. Andrea Sick (HfK-Bremen), Prof. Dr. Elke Bippus (ZHdK-Zurich), and Prof. Ralf Baecker (HfK-Bremen) as a co-promotor.