Off-Grid collects stories of protest infrastructures assembled in neighborhood yards and encrypted Telegram chats, internet cables stretched between apartment blocks, DIY practices, attempts to build a toaster from scratch, and a self-sustaining research capsule designed to operate for up to 120 days in isolation. This book moves across rural art institutions, repurposed power plants, exhibitions curated within forests and farmlands, and the early digital networks of the 1990s to explore what autonomy can mean in a world built on fragile, interconnected systems—and how much room for maneuver remains within them.

We rely on systems we hardly notice, until the lights go out or the network fails. But in those moments, another kind of knowledge arises: DIY solutions, forgotten analog technologies, and collective ways of making and being.

Contributors

Andreas Broeckmann, Lizaveta German, Garnet Hertz, Adelina Luft, Mari-Liis Rebane, Antonina Stebur, Timo Toots, Helen Turner, and Raluca Voinea.

Contents

• Introduction by Katažyna Jankovska
• Pipelines, Railway Systems, Telegram Chats and Counter-Infrastructures – Interview with Antonina Stebur
• Infrastructural consciousness – Tekla Aslanishvili: A State in a State
• A former coal power station; where art generates electricity – Interview with E_WERK
• Punkt Nezlomnosti (The Unbreakable Point) – Interview with Lizaveta German
• DIY-by-necessity and DIY-by-choice – Interview with Garnet Hertz
• Building a Toaster from Scratch: Thomas Thwaites
• A Curated Path across Farmlands, Meadows, Forests and Swamps in South Estonia for Research on Art and Life
• Off-Grid arts space in the outskirts of Bucharesst
• Balcony to Balcony Internet – Cristina Cochior
• Distributed Communication Infrastructures in the 1990s: BBS, Mailing Lists and (Net)Radio
• A Nomadic, Isolated, Self-sufficient Theater Machine: Marko Peljhan
• Notes
• Colophon

This publication is the outcome of the Alex Adriaansens Residency 2025 at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media.

Paperback, published in 2026, 142 pages.