Special isssue

What might critical accounts of infrastructure look like? What role might the visual play in critical attentiveness to and accountings for infrastructure,
especially that which is underground? Stemming from the challenges posed in trying to research subsurface infrastructures in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, what follows is an experiment with creatively responding to geographer Deborah Cowen’s invitation to “follow” infrastructures as means to produce a more engaged infrastructural politics. Beginning from the spatial-temporal problematics framed by Cowen’s proposal for infrastructural following, the essay explores the possibilities and limitations of visual and textual forms for building accounts of colonial infrastructures and their afterlives. Tracking between the here and there, the then and now and the intimate and the imperials, the essay comes to realise that what started as following the subsurface infrastructures of Phnom Penh, become inevitably the entanglement of three sets of infrastructures; the multiple colonial legacies of Phnom Penh’s subsurface water systems; the colonial pasts and presents of the archives and the production of the images of the subsurface that sit within them; as well as a set of questions around or a performance of a politics of academic infrastructure in the form of the visual essay