Infrastructure is usually invisible, until it is gone or stops working. Writing in Platform, Assistant Professor Sahar Hosseini takes the 2026 US-Israeli war on Iran as the occasion to ask what infrastructure actually is, and to whom it belongs. It argues that the language of war performs a deliberate act of stripping infrastructure of its human dimensions and obscuring devastations imposed on ordinary people. Against that erasure, she reads musician Ali Ghamsari’s act of playing before the Damavand powerplant as a sonic insistence that infrastructure belongs to the people, not to the states that administer it. To target infrastructure is not to strike at a regime, but to strike the most vulnerable ordinary people sandwiched between internal and external forces, for whom bridges, powerplants and waterways are not abstractions, but the fabric of daily life.
Read the full article here: https://www.platformspace.net/home/the-politics-and-poetics-of-infrastructure-under-fire
Read Sahar Hosseini's faculty profile here: https://haa.pitt.edu/people/sahar-hosseini