SD52 Andreas Petrossiants "We Can Now See Clearly What We Are Up Against"

SD52 Andreas Petrossiants "We Can Now See Clearly What We Are Up Against"

In this episode, we begin by expressing our admiration for and inspiration from our late friend Marina Vishmidt. We actually met last year in Vienna at the conference celebrating her work "What Is Infrastructural Critique?”. We discuss Vishmidt critical insights into the collapse of the myth of artistic autonomy and how art operates within broader infrastructures of capital. Petrossiants, who has been involved in housing struggles in New York City for some time, is now pursuing a PhD at NYU, working with Michelle Castañeda and Fred Moten. He has been researching the struggles of 1970s Italy from the perspective urban development and spatial composition (following Neil Gray), including autoreduction movements, proletarian shopping, and mass refusals of work and payment, alongside movements such as lotta continua, potere operaio and Nuclei Armati Proletari (NAP), and figures like Silvia Federici and Henri Lefebvre.

We address the contradictions of art and institutional critique, where even radical themes, such as incarceration, are absorbed into liberal museum frameworks. From both U.S. and Italian perspectives, we consider the emergence of a post-liberal order and ask what defines citizenship today, as new forms of exclusion and racism become more explicit. The conversation turns to ongoing struggles in the US against ICE, asking how these different fronts articulate within a social field where production and reproduction have increasingly merged.

Finally, we examine how infrastructures, such as those developed by companies like Amazon, are not only economic but increasingly carceral, enabling new forms of control in which subjects risk becoming disposable. We ask what defines citizenship today, as more explicit forms of racism re-emerge. In this context, Israel’s treatment of Palestinian lives appears as a forerunner of broader tendencies across the West, where similar logics of exclusion and disposability are beginning to take hold in regards to immigrants for example. The podcast situates these trajectories within a broader question: how to understand and confront a system in which urban space, culture, and social life are increasingly subsumed while a new wave of fascism emerges. We can now see clearly what we are up against, however we still have to see what forms of radicalisation will emerge.