Visual Essay Research Articles

Greenham: Costume, memory and activism in outdoor performance

This visual essay illustrates the transformative, performative and narrative potential costume can have in the context of outdoor site-responsive work, by looking at Ceschi + Lane’s recent R&D project, Greenham. The project included two performances that took place on Greenham Common, the site of a former RAF and American Army base in the English countryside, which is now common land. Greenham is also the former site of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp, set up in 1981 to protest against the British government allowing American cruise missiles to be stored at the base. In response to the scarred landscape of the post-Cold War dereliction and the contested history of Greenham Common, we created costumes that embodied imaginative and provocative ideas around landscape and memory, the body and its environment and women’s relationship to power. These costumes acted as critical intervention and commentary in a public space. This visual essay provides retrospective analysis of these costumes, their effect on the performers and their contribution to the dramaturgy of the site-responsive performance. Drawing on contemporary references, it attempts to articulate the work’s contribution to the wider discussion around costume’s agency and costume as carrier of meaning in public spaces and as part of site-responsive performance practice.

Fraying Parachutes: Costume agency and convivencia in contemporary circus performance making

Fraying Parachutes explores from a choreographer/facilitator’s perspective the agency found in the costume making processes during Femme de Feu’s Circus Sessions 2019, in which three abandoned parachutes were upcycled and transformed into circus costumes. It traces the journey from conceptualization to ad hoc design, involving de-construction and much physical entanglement, to the eventual wear and non-wearability of the costumes in performance. Bringing together fourteen artists from South America, North America and Europe, the embodied research that informed this work took as its foci: positive receptivity, hospitality and fascination as qualities and modes of creating collectively. The experimental circus costume making processes provided an opportunity to physically expand upon theories of agential realism and entanglement, in relation to the material and the social. The re-purposed parachutes served as constant reminders of flight, suspension, risk and rescue, qualities that are innately present in circus technique and performance. In ‘rescuing’ the parachutes from landfill, the work also gave visibility to an ecological ethic in performance making, or what Tanja Beer refers to as a practice of ecoscenography, where issues of waste and sustainability may be addressed. Underscoring this essay will be the notion of convivencia or a literal ‘living with’ other and the non-human as essential to process and performance. Distinct to a co-labouring of ideas, in Circus Sessions, convivencia encompassed our creative entanglements, the friction and flow in artistic decision making, our discussions, reflections and laughter. It would also attune our listening to epistemologies of the South, to the diverse cultural perspectives and sensibilities that the different performers from three continents brought to the project. In this visual essay, costume agency is understood as a tensile potentiality that generates creative energy informed by the serendipitous opportunities found in the sensory binding of costume making processes.

Agentic Aharya: Vibrant masks from South Asia

This essay foregrounds visuals of masks and costumes from Chhau and Bhaona performances from South Asia. Using a new materialist lens along with writings on ritual images, it reflects on how these masks and costumes have agency. Referred to as Aharya in the Indian context, the masks and costumes of the case studies straddle a unique position between performative objects, religious objects and everyday decorative objects. This multiple positionality endows the masks and costumes an agency that displaces the traditional subject–object binaries of actor and costume. Highlighting Aharya’s inherent affective and ritual properties and foregrounding the mask-makers’ use of local materials, centuries-old techniques and their skills and creativity to conceptualize masks that work alongside and beyond performances, the visual essay shows how these objects exceed the maker and the performer and reach wider audiences.

Augmenting Design Education for Sustainability through Field Exploration: An Experience of Learning from DIY Practices in a Rural Community

This article (visual essay) provides a glimpse of a field trip ventured by design students as part of a larger study of developing a localised version of design education for sustainability, focusing on the wants and needs of non-urban populations in vast Russian hinterlands. The central goal is to introduce would-be designers to the concepts of locally appropriate technology and sustainable/circular living by real-life examples and, eventually, teach them to recognise the sustainable potential of place-based technologies and practices of their making, using and maintaining. The primary data came from the trip to Pozhva, a village in Permskiy Krai, Russia, that gained popularity among DIY activists and users of off-road vehicles in Russia in the early 2000s because of its unique, community-centred manufacture of lightweight ATVs on low-pressure tires, nicknamed “jeeps”. This article presents the students’ journey in a comic strip portraying a composite character of technologies and their user-designers as experts in local conditions and (subconsciously) agents of circularity. The article closes with a discussion on the expedition’s discoveries and learning outcomes, correlating them with broader implications for design education.

Cross-cultural visual communication at the Wanchin Church in Taiwan

This visual essay presents seven photos taken at the Wanchin Church and a nearby place during my fieldwork in Wanchin Village in southern Taiwan. While Wanchin Church serves as a working Catholic church, it does not propagate its faith in conventional ways. To facilitate cross-cultural exchange with local communities, it has integrated Taiwanese folk traditions into its missionary work. Rather than comment on Catholic doctrine and its religious values, this visual essay focuses on diverse visual elements of religion and their connection to different communities and cultures in Wanchin Village. These photos tell stories about how a foreign religion has transformed its visual language to fit in with local customs and lifestyles.

Review: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, by Tiya Miles

Review: <i>All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake</i>, by Tiya Miles

Rising to the Challenge

With the widening scope of design, the importance of the design studio has concomitantly responded by transforming its own character to become inclusive of the educational domains of history, professional practices, theories, technical, and material studies. The absorption of such domains, part-and-parcel of the studio setting, has irrevocably highlighted the importance of education within the container of the studio or rather ‘in-situ’ education. However, with the volatility of external factors, the challenges posed to design education are multiple. Especially in light of the rise of a global pandemic, educators globally have had to implement crisis strategies in response. This short visual essay outlines the obstacles of online teaching; moving from resistance to embracing the tools and features that online education provides. Sharing the gained experiences, starting at the rise of the pandemic, the text engages seven key points of interest, while practically demonstrating responses in the product design setting.

UNDERSTANDING BOUNDARIES OF SPACES AND EACH OTHER: CONTEMPORARY ARTIST USED IN VISUAL ARTS

This visual essay focuses on how social media tools and contemporary artist influence learners and the course process as one of the methods used in visual arts lectures. Participants of this project are ten 6th graders in a public secondary school selected with a random sampling method. At the beginning of the project, researchers asked to the learners about social media considerations, what social media tools were and how often they used social media. In the process of the study, participants used the Louisiana Channel and Art21 channels on YouTube to watch artist Julie Mehretu’s videos about her workshops and actual works performances. Following this implementation, researchers interviewed the learners about the course. As a result of this project, it is assumed that learners will have more active participation in the course by using social media and learners would have more positive views on using social media tools in visual arts courses. In addition, it was concluded that getting to know contemporary artists and looking at their works in detail contributed to children's artistic perspectives. Keywords: Contemporary Artist, Visual Arts Education, Social Media Tools, YouTube, Technology in Education

Drones &amp; Cultural Aesthetic

Initially trained as a miniature painter at the National College of Arts, Lahore, Pakistan, the author has aggressively combined new media and conceptual work with her traditional practice. The work is intended to shed light on the complexity of acculturation, politics, and power. This visual essay documents and describes Chishty’s projects such as Drone Art Series and other works specifically related to Pakistan’s border relations with countries like India, China, and Afghanistan. The artist will share her inspiration and motivation behind the projects developed since 2011, including paintings, installations, and collaborative projects.

The Shadow Database: Activism, Art, and Aspiration within Urban Regeneration

This visual essay presents Database (E)state, which is an artist and activist-led PhD research project that explores the role of relational databases in processes of urban regeneration. The essay addresses the proposed demolition of Cressingham Gardens Estate by Lambeth Borough Council, in South West London, in the UK. By depicting the problems associated with accessing, comprehending, and creating a resident-controlled ‘Shadow Database’ of Lambeth’s databases systems, the essay points to the material, ethical, and political implications of database technologies in residents' lives. This articulation draws from art practice, philosophical theories derived from Gilbert Simondon and Michel Foucault, and also histories of database technologies. The act of creating the Shadow Database, therefore, combines theory, art, and activism as a means to make human and technical components of Lambeth’s databases more accountable to residents.

Fighting sexual violence in Egypt on social media: A visual essay on assault police

ABSTRACT In this essay, we explore how Instagram-based account ‘Assault Police’ uses the tools of social media to name and shame (alleged) perpetrators and to give testimonies of sexually intimidating, violent experiences. We propose the concept of 'framing' to study the development of the account and the campaign, which allowed to create a very local, Egyptian #MeToo movement. By analysing photos posted by the account between July 2020 and January 2021, our findings indicate the ability of Assault Police to adapt to different challenges. Moreover, the account which started as a single-issue movement soon developed into an initiative which focuses on structural roots of violence against women.

Love Is in the Air?

A novel artwork appeared and dissolved in the air above the Welsh town of Llandudno in 2018. Vapour trails crafted by jets belonging to the RAF's 'Red Arrow' team, created an unlikely image for the assembled crowd: that of a huge love heart. This paper re-presents a 'grounded' ethnographic account of this moment - performed as part of Armed Forces Day - for a PhD thesis in 2019 - but places it in a new historical and contextual context. This visual essay examines this creative medium as one able to capture political territories through instilling different 'atmospheres' amongst spectators on the ground (Anderson, 2009: Duff, 2015). Affects included awe and fear as well as admiration and respect. Through my own account of absorbing sights and sounds made both on the ground and in the air, I argue that this display was a strategic response by the UK government to a growing independence movement in Wales, one which has long rejected militarism and the British State. Performed in a post-Brexit period of constitutional uncertainly, aerial theatre can be seen in this instance as 'spectacle to project images of future warfare and national power' (Holman, 2019). The air display created a 'hostile environment' as much as it evoked a sense of collective belonging to any United Kingdom. This aerial performance was one which showed how weapons of war have been used as the unlikely authoring instruments of heartfelt warmth, part of a populist political discoure that invokes displays of love and loyalty through performative threats and force.

An art installation in action: Prototyping a virtual embodiment generator for the prevention of intrusive technology

By engaging with network technologies on computers and digital devices, equipped with sensors such as cameras, we are part of the telematic society that can connect with people in real-time near as well as far apart. While digital technology enables us to connect and maintain relationships with other people, we still rely on virtual embodiment to represent our persona in the digital world. There is a range of visual representations that function as a virtual embodiment in the digital world, often a profile image, an avatar or a graphic device are used as a proxy. In this particular practice-based research project, I am exploring how the risks of sharing biometric data can be prevented, by prototyping an abstract virtual embodiment in an art installation. The computational design applied to procedures such as facial recognition driven by artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning can result in intrusive experiences. If the act of being detected or identified by AI becomes intrusive, are there ways we can use abstract virtual embodiments to represent ourselves without being detected? This visual essay is positioning the practice-based research in an art context while documenting the conceptual process of an interactive prototype.

Sculpting Places with Play

This visual essay works at the confluence of art, place and play and presents a practice which asks: what can happen if we take a group of adults and classical paintings as inspiration and have them play together in specific places? It aims to demonstrate the visual souvenirs of adult play, the photographs takenby the participants. The objective is to interpret them in order to gain an understanding of how hierarchy-free encounters in the liminal space of play can foster empathy for places. Pausing to gaze at the visual data, it seems that with art-based play, we create lasting memories after which the place, the players and the source art can never be seen with indifference again. This can lead to emotions, actions and activism towards a more desirable future.

Slow Pace Communication

This visual essay portrays the first phase of a communication experience via postcards with participants from Portugal of the project “AMASS: Acting onthe Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture”, under the social distance restrictions of the Covid19 pandemic situation, between January and June 2021. Theexperience is described and discussed in terms of the dynamics created, the methodologies of the research group and possibilities of the strategy to overcome the limitations of digital communication in disadvantaged communities and arts based projects.

Hidden persuaders on film: Exploring young people’s lived experience through visual essays

The Hidden Persuaders research group examines ‘brainwashing’ in the Cold War for the roles, real and imagined, played by psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Our project engaged young people in an exploration of the history of fears about brainwashing, and enabled them to explore their thoughts and ideas about the forces that shape their lives in contemporary society, through film-making. Working with three schools in the Camden area of London, our partners at the Derek Jarman Lab media hub, Birkbeck, University of London, and an artist facilitator (Lizzie Burns), we invited Year 12 students to learn filming and editing to create their own short video essays. The use of this format resulted in a significant depth of engagement and generated a wealth of creative responses. The various stages of the film-making process enabled the students to work out the terms of an argument and to consider how best to express it concisely. In the resulting films, they came up with a variety of forms of visual storytelling, and used the medium to express their thoughts, feelings and ideas in diverse ways, giving us a range of new perspectives which we could consider in relation to our historical research.

Connectivity conservation: Supporting thriving ecosystems for people and planet

Author(s): Schuver, Austin; Oppler, Gabriel | Abstract: This visual essay in "The Photographer's Frame" explores aspects of the natural and cultural complexity that is a hallmark of large landscape conservation.

A Room for Archaeologists and Kids

Beginning in June 2018, some forty‑five students from Zurich and Lima led by Guillaume Othenin-Girard (ETH Zurich) and Vincent Juillerat (PUCP) worked together to produce a structure in the heart of the archaeological landscape of Pachacamac, Peru. The project was the culmination of a half‑year collaboration between Studio Tom Emerson of D-ARCH, ETH Zurich and Taller 5 of the Facultad de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, PUCP Lima, at the invitation of Denise Pozzi-Escot, the director of the Museum of Pachacamac. In this new structure, archaeologists make their first examination of artefacts emerging from the digs, shaded from the punishing Andean sun and in view of passing visitors and school children, who in turn, perform their own exploration in the sandpits across the courtyard. At each end, new finds are stored in rooms enclosed by woven cane walls before being transferred to the museum for permanent conservation. The structure was collaboratively designed and constructed by the students in three weeks in June and July, following a joint research project over several months that produced a new topological survey of the territory: the Pachacamac Atlas. The reality of a landscape changes according to the perceptions of time and memory that underlie it. The visual essay that follows is an attempt to recall the intuitive relationships and invisible links arising from the superimposition of the Atlas onto the processes of design and construction. The collective knowledge gathered over the course of the territorial survey draws an understanding of the place which is larger than the ancient sanctuary per se – unveiling ways of making and the material flows between humankind and the environment on various scales. This methodology of survey drawing reveals the inherent capacity of the architecture student to think both as a maker and a territorial agent, thus triggering an awareness of the designer’s social and environmental responsibilities within the design and construction process.

On silent feet: the library and the child

ABSTRACT In 1966 the photographer Martine Franck was commissioned by Life International to document the experiences of children in a new library in Paris. The visual essay she produced illuminated the materiality, the design and the children’s use of the space. In Birmingham, a recent unconnected research project, ‘Libraries in Women’s Lives’, captured women’s childhood memories of libraries. The women’s ‘spatial stories’ (de Certeau, 1984) offer reflections on libraries in different times and places. Strikingly though, their accounts resonate with Franck’s images of the library in Paris. This paper brings image and narrative into conversation with spatial theory to make sense of these similarities, and to explore responses to library space. This paper is a comment on the materiality of the library. It reveals the haptic and visual pleasures of these sites. Through this attention to memory, the research suggests a different starting point for debates around the future of libraries. It argues that looking to the past might be a good way of thinking about the libraries of the future. Further, and by virtue of attending to the visual alongside writing on spatial theory, this research comments on the relationship between representations of space in image and in text.

Reconciling with others, within oneself, and the circle(s) of time

This visual essay depicts my personal experiences with the San peoples of South Africa. Almost twenty years ago, I learned of a personal loss while examining their ancient rock carvings and used the San people’s beliefs about the reconciliation of death and nature to heal. In 2019, I ran a workshop for young Khoe-Sans peoples, offering them a chance to connect and find harmony within themselves. They shared their personal stories and visual creations with each other, reviving the disappearing storytelling tradition. As Indigenous peoples have often been treated as objects without respect, following the ethical rules of research was part of reconciliation. My approach throughout the workshop was to embody connectedness and care; according to the feedback, our interaction succeeded despite our cultural differences.