An/Aesthetics of Infrastructural Ruination: On Jumana Manna’s Thirty Plumbers in the Belly

This essay presents the first scholarly account of contemporary artist Jumana Manna’s practice as a sculptor, examining the 2021 installation piece Thirty Plumbers in the Belly. More specifically, the essay thinks with and through this work about what is called the an/aesthetics of infrastructure: the tendency of infrastructure to straddle the boundary of what is and what is not available for conscious sensuous apperception and experience. The text focuses on how Manna’s work challenges and qualifies received notions concerning infrastructure’s putative invisibility, shifting critical attention to the role of infrastructure “where infrastructure is built to fail,” as the artist herself has put it. As such, the work conveys a sense of the infrastructural ruination visited upon Palestine and is political in its form even if no explicit political referent or content (as the term is commonly understood) appears to be present. The two final sections of the essay attempt to articulate how Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, surprisingly, pits the stillness of its sculptural objects against itself to create a sonorous and resounding ensemble that registers everyday acts of infrastructural improvisation.