TEXTUAL ACTANTS (INFRASTRUCTURE) (2026)
Published by Ma Bibliotheque, available here.
'For a time, this was a regular journey, only before these tunnels were burrowed through (the better to spew the city's innards into its own estuarine afterbirth).'
TEXTUAL ACTANTS is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them, to the onscreen 'I-beam' cursor by which we navigate digital text. Via the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, six interweaving texts attend to the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.
'You won't read this and Adam Walker hasn't authored it. Instead, and together, you'll be in this book, mapping, systematising, and modelling ‐ forming it from the material world's governances, its archives and philosophies of such. This is a generous work for thinkers who will notice a baton being passed, and roll up their sleeves.'
Roy Claire Potter
'Adam Walker takes us onto the scaffolding and the dust gets in our eyes. A preface that doubts itself. A beam that holds and yields. A cursor blinking in the dark. Steel and syntax. Desert and data. The angel of history turning, failing to turn. Artists in hangars. Pillars in sand. Trams through forests that remember empires. Words laid end to end like girders, then unlaid, then laid again. Nothing is stable here: not the author, not the object, not the ground beneath the work. The book proceeds by drift and detour, by breakdown and rearrangement. It builds only to dismantle. It names only to unname. Between blast furnace and browser tab, between archive and body, something flickers. In prose at once spare and restless, Adam Walker takes us through deserts both material and imagined, through post-industrial ruins and mirrored dreamscapes, through the infrastructures that hold our texts and the texts that hold our infrastructures. The result is a lucid derangement: a meditation on art, labour, history and exhaustion, where nothing stands alone and nothing quite falls.'
Frank Wasser
Texts 1 and 2 within the book were previously developed as audio performances, broadcast in Summer 2024 with TACO / RTM.FM (Best listened to through headphones or speakers.)
Voices: Jane McDowell and Rosalind Stockwell
Steel I-beam percussion and additional voice: Adam Walker
Mixing and mastering: David Pilcher (Calibre Sound)
Text 1: THE THINGS IN PLAY An art-historical journey from the mid-twentieth century to the present. From the desert as a metaphorical (or literal) presumed 'tabula rasa' to 'canonical' abstract sculptural practices such as those of Caro, Serra and especially Judd, this text traces the place of steel in twentieth-century art history, and how and why such 'material' practices have been joined (or, possibly, superseded) by textualized, conceptual and research-based practices in more recent decades. It explores Garth Evans' Artist Placement Group (APG) work within British Steel as part of a trajectory through to the new material conditions of artist-hood within the neoliberal present.
Text 2: A TOUR OF THE MONUMENTS OF CHARLEROI, BELGIUM
Text 2 operates in close dialogue with Text 1, but examines the historical circulations of the steel industry itself. It centres on an autoethnographic writing journey to Belgium, both to the suburbs where I grew up and to the former steel making centre of Charleroi, where the steel I-beam (from which the 'I-beam cursor' takes its name) was first produced. There are coincidental parallels between the timeline of the closure of the steelworks in Charleroi and my own move to the UK, in-sync with the Arcelor Mittal Orbit arriving on the skyline of my new home city. Arcelor Mittal was the eventual final owner of the Charleroi steelworks.
Supported by the Manchester School of Art Research Fund
