My feelings on the 2019 Turner prize and the nominees’ (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani) request to be recognised collectively move between its challenging of artistic individualism and its acceptance.

The artists did accept the terms of the prize — both nomination, and now all winning and taking that forward. True, they will split the prize, but they did not jeopardise the possibility that their nomination would not be converted in to the cachet.

True, they leveraged this position to challenge the terms of the prize, forming an alliance or platform against which the judges could not refuse, and from which to make a claim on the collective and interconnected or ecological nature of the politics they engaged with. And yet, the power of this platform is nonetheless derived from the exceptionality (though combined) of their nominations.

To view this from an infrastructural perspective: it is by already being in a position of exceptionality, of infrastructural power (as nominees) that the artists are able to assert this collective control over the terms of the condition. They determine the way in which they interoperate with each other and the prize. How can the judges say that no, in fact one winner must be given; this would undermine the selection of any of them — a fact that the assertion of collectivity pointedly underscores and mobilises.

And yet it is the substance of their claim that comes under pressure from the mobilisation of this privilege. Collectivity of purpose and an interconnecting politic s in the face of social division. To recognise ones position in a matrix, and to assert the possibility of indexing oneself differently within that is an exceptional claim rather than a normative one. For the political claim to be effective — that is to say that solidarity and building a platform for it, is more important than the recognition of the prize, I would suggest, more jeopardy would have been needed for its participants, but only regarding that recognition.

Ultimately the stake, which the act did gesture towards, is the necessary task of re-infrastructuring the terms in which cultural work affects and produces the world. While individual privilege plays a part in this, and is a position to mobilised, it cannot remain as the heart and centre of claims to the contrary. For this we need an infrastructural politics, a relational ethics, rather than simply an institutional or representational one.