What happens when artistic practices cease to approach territory as an object of observation, a backdrop, or an iconographic theme, and instead operate as forms of support, listening, research, and local organization within specific contexts? Taking this premise as a starting point, the proposed issue brings together artistic practices that treat territories not as an image, but as an active field of relations, conflict and local knowledges in a present marked by profound geopolitical and ecological crises. Rather than merely thematizing landscapes or communities, the works assembled here operate through an infrastructural understanding of territory. Infrastructure, in this sense, refers not only to material support but to a systemic engagement with the surrounding context, including relations between ecology, economy, modes of production, social organization and cultural practices. The proposal draws on Chilean theorist Justo Pastor Mellado’s distinction between service-oriented and infrastructural artistic practices, privileging works that do not simply circulate within the art system but produce durable conditions for research, memory, local articulation, and knowledge production.
Across mountainous borderlands, river basins, agricultural plains, urban centres and rural peripheries, the issue brings together contributions with a diversity of editorial formats emerging from distinct territorial settings. They include proposals attentive to Andean cosmotechnics at the borderlands of Chile; investigations into the Río Bravo as a site of geopolitical dispute and territorial imagination at the Mexico-US border; experimental visual explorations of informal commerce routes between the Caspian and Persian littorals; process-based research on water systems, local cosmologies, and socio-cultural ecologies in the plains of Chengdu; field-based approaches to the relations between agriculture and ecological vulnerability in the Mira river basin in Portugal; and experiences linked to rurality, food systems, cooperation, and local knowledges in the Serra da Mantiqueira in Brazil. These are joined by practices concerned with biocultural heritage, living archives, and decentralized forms of rural learning and collective organization.