December 2025
Weaving World Themed Issue Features:
Weaving worlds
This themed issue of the Journal of Visual Culture is concerned with how to think and work across what might at first sight seem to be incommensurate worlds. The articles assembled here think through questions of evidence, affect and speculation, and how these operate within our current economy of knowledge production through the use of practices such as mapping, modelling, sensing and storytelling. While these practices are not new, they have been transformed through advancements in technology and through the way they are embedded within the digital realm. In attending to these practices, the authors give precedence to different ways of knowing the world, to other forms of intelligence, and demonstrate a commitment to developing forms of practice that weave together what might be contradictory positions into future scenarios.
Towards uncommon grounds: heterogenous vocabularies of the valley and the gulf
Evelina Gambino and Ishita Sharma
This article stages a dialogue between the two distant sites of our respective research, located in India and Georgia, both of which are at the centre of major infrastructural transformations. From these two sites of Kutch and west Georgia, the authors have noticed that local vocabularies are testaments to material economies of place and often contain traces of histories and relations that are erased by the global script through which infrastructural developments are justified and narrated. In striving to build a different kind of narration of the transformations that have invested them they place their incommensurability in focus through our exchange. Instead of comparison, this bringing together of two worlds is shaped by acknowledging a shared interest and common concerns. Borrowing from De La Cadena (‘Uncommoning nature’, 2015), the authors define their effort as a form of ‘uncommoning’ that shapes possible alliances to resist extractive projects, while allowing for divergence and differences in how the world is viewed (or written).
Heritage as stratum: a method of negotiating the Anthropocene
This article explores a mapping practice that infers heritage as stratum; both as a concept which problematizes its appearance as a stable entity, as well as material through which possible futures can be negotiated with earth-others. We open up the concept of stratigraphy as a way of visualizing the earth across time dealing with material, formations and events. We employed this experimental mapping method in the Hindu Kush Himalayas that embodies fragilities of the Anthropocene manifesting in accelerated glacial melt and ongoing geological formations. Material and immaterial heritage and their relations were visualized as they get attuned to formations and deformations of matter, memory and imagination surfacing how landscapes are shaped and maintained in a changing climate. We explore these through three modes of negotiating the changing landscape: acts of relevance, repair, and remembrance, each offering a non-sequential temporality of heritage in attempts to craft possible futures.
Sensing social natures: a hydro-geothermal perspective
This article examines the materialization of the geothermal energy field in the Aegean Region of Turkey and explores the way in which hydrogeothermal sensing and sensemaking was instrumentalized to build the territory of the nation state and those of energy companies. Clusters of geothermal energy plants, local thermal baths and elite thermal hotels serve as sites where layered and recursive forms of appropriation and dispossession enacted can be studied. The conceptualization of local thermal bath culture as a practice generative of social natures and situated hydro-geological knowledge production as a ‘society making’ science offers insights into the possibility of commoning and sensing in common where, through field encounters, a diversity is assembled around hydro-geothermal matters of concern. Guided by fieldwork and testimonies, this conceptual reworking reveals sites where reappropriation may begin within a territory shaped by enclosures and marked by friction between parties engaged in different forms of hydrogeothermal sensing.
Mapping, drawing, weaving, writing counter-extractive cartographies of mining sites
In the context of an accelerated demand for resources, this article assembles counter-extractive cartographies from areas of ore extraction which react to loss and questions of urgent heritage, and project (post)mining futures. The cartographies focus on intersectional feminist, Indigenous, and migratory voices, which are often absent at decision-making tables. Lena Sjötoft’s sketch of incisions into the land of the Sámi, Margit Anttila’s embroidered map of changes in her home deeply affected by mining, mapped care activities in an Austrian mining town, and Ina Knobblock’s practices of writing–weaving Sámi feminisms show anticolonial and feminist modes of local struggles. Altering and nuancing knowledges about areas of extractivism, and imagining their futures otherwise, they engage artistic practices and situated literacies. The discussion of their practices is based on eight years of site-specific work undertaken at two different sites of ore extraction in Sábme/Sweden and Austria, often in collaboration with local practitioners.
Paranoic mapping at the Lebanese–Israeli border
This article examines the Lebanese–Israeli underground border geography as a site of conflict that is enmeshed in knowledge gaps and paranoia, and across territories and subjects. The author interrogates a series of controversial scientific claims regarding cross-border subterranean water resources in the Upper Jordan River basin and navigates the complexity of researching in such a context with a long history of violence that leaks into the present. In his analysis, the author highlights how knowledge gaps produce a fertile ground where paranoia thrives. Paranoia is here defined as a mode of being in the world that builds connections between seemingly unrelated events and objects. Consequently, the article examines how knowledge gaps and paranoia are materialized across territorial and individual scales, drawing parallels between the affective dimension of border geographies and the research methodology the author develops. This methodology emerges from the specific context of the Lebanese–Israeli border geography where knowledge production is set within a framework of resistive subjectivities.
Politics of the turbid image: against underwater fascist visual rhetoric
This article examines submerged environments and modes of visual mediation that are used to depict them. Attending to the turbid image as an optical register of complex material and political conditions, the authors challenge the normalization of clarity in underwater imaging and question assumptions of access, legibility and the opacity/transparency binary. Navigating between clear and turbid waters, they draw on feminist, postcolonial and anti-colonial approaches to understand these political ecologies and their mediation as critical sites of intervention. The article examines the depiction of coral environments by Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and naturalist Ernst Haeckel, whose visions inform lineages of ecofascist thinking and the contemporary resurgence of authoritarian environmental imaginaries. Finally, drawing on examples from their own practices and those of allied thinkers and practitioners, the authors attempt to redress these trajectories through anti-fascist submerged practices that foreground the murky, situated entanglements of water against reductive, extractive, totalizing visual regimes.
Counter-modelling darkly: figuration in the age of simulation
This article examines the intersection of computational systems and knowledge politics against the backdrop of ‘dark epistemology’ which is a paradigm in which digital technologies subvert the very terms for figuration and truth. Using Sylvia Wynter’s counter-human narrative theory, the author posits that algorithmic media are always mediated, never a raw record, but a site of struggle in which power operates through amplifying uncertainty and derailing hegemonic representation of the ‘human’. The argument places emphasis on the way computer systems, as ‘metaphors for metaphor’ (see Chun, in Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, 2013), reassert and disrupt power figurations, facilitating the dissemination of counterfiguration as countering practice. In following the trajectory of a range of examples from satellite imagery to electronic astroturfing, the article locates ‘modelling darkly’ as practice that takes advantage of epistemic turbulence to create discursive space for absent or disenfranchised views.
Abstraction, diffraction, experimentation: the making of ‘The Amber Spyglass’ in Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials
This article traces the construction of ‘The Amber Spyglass’ (2015[2000]) from Philip Pullman’s homonymous children’s novel, to explore two interrelated conceptual issues. These are the problem of abstraction as a productive and experimental practice, and that of vision as something materially mediated rather than pre-given. The author’s contention is that the making of ‘The Amber Spyglass’ dramatizes the situated character of knowledge production in a compelling way, allowing us to grasp experimentation as an ethically grounded and politically committed practice. The article offers a ‘diffractive’ reading of an episode narrating the construction of this fictitious visualization technology, by putting the story in conversation with writings by AN Whitehead and Félix Guattari, as well as feminist writers Karen Barad, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Donna Haraway. This is done in order to lay bare the materially and socially generative character of knowledge practices for crafting alternative visions of the world in times of ecological collapse.
Vignette as a way of seeing
A vignette can be considered a snapshot of a situation, or a moment in time that in its framing and composition might offer insights into more complex relations. In many ways, a vignette is a construction, a way of giving prominence to that which is precious or of significance. In this article, the authors consider the vignette as a form of ethical mediation and an intervention into conversations that are never fully whole. Their reflections have emerged in the context of the exhibition, Undocumented? – Paidal which gathered together narratives on displacement. The authors ask: What kind of memory work and documentation do vignettes perform within traumatic contexts such as those of undocumented migration? And how does this differ from witnessing as a form of evidentiary knowing and documenting of difficult events? These questions have ethical implications for how we might address forms of violence within academic and cultural work.
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https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/vcua/24/2
