The essay “Strategy and Spell: Art as Infrastructural Change” is an investigation of the performative force art spaces have on the field of art and on various infrastructures at large. It is also a strategic proposition on how to envision a position for action and from which to gain leverage within the current neoliberal global context. Drawing from contemporary art, design and media theory on systemic thinking, and the post-contemporary time complex, the essay reflects on two personal projects: the exhibition space casamata (2014–2017), and the project TRAMA, developed for the 33rd São Paulo Biennial – Affective Affinities (2018). Favoring a speculative approach that tackles large-scale problematics and collective organization, it demonstrates how there are many potentialities contained in exhibition spaces and how such potentialities could, through an understanding of a contemporary art megastructure and art practice as infrastructural change, operate new experiments for the art system
