Visual Essay Research Articles

Yearning for Kinship: An Artistic Exploration of Moss and Embroidery

In this visual essay, the author examines her relationship with moss through the lens of embroidery. Through practice-led research, she proposes to engage with the medium of embroidery as a tactile, reflective method of inquiry: a practice of exploration embedded in time, feeling, sensation, posture, gesture, artistic expression, and a yearning for kinship. She argues that embroidery provides the necessary care, material intimacy and a more thoughtful pace to familiarize oneself with the world and temporality of mosses. She begins by proposing that knowledge about the world of plants can be gained by initiating a subjective approach, one that is grounded in her own wonder for moss. She then goes on to establish a shared material and expressive quality between embroidery and moss, by thinking through her medium and creating a multisensory practice which allows for an embodied awareness of her chosen subject. She demonstrates how embroidery, as a mindful medium grounded in slowness, echoes the vegetal temporality and growth rate of mosses and finally, she examines the potential of embroidery as a practice of care, one that allows her to form kinships with the more-than-human world.

Wandering Tree. Along the Path of Acclimation

Trees are “rooted”. Nevertheless, long-term scientific observations have proved that trees do migrate through landscapes and regions, very slowly and over decades to survive the impacts of climate change which advances faster than they do. The Wandering Tree project by artist Agnes Meyer-Brandis observes tree migration in different ecosystems, in Finland at Siikaneva peatland. The project creates narratives and raises questions of the effects of climate change on the ecosystems considered “naturally” unchangeable. This visual essay illustrates yet undiscovered stories of a tree. What happens in the peatland when we are not there? What stories will entangle with the new path of the pine?

New species in the Mediterranean: a visual essay on human impact on biodiversity

Our work begins with the collection of waste on beaches with environmental activists. This waste, dumped into the sea, is returned and swallowed up again by the sea. Plastic bottles, cutlery, bags or condoms replace shells, crabs and other marine flora and fauna. We wanted to portray this new invasive plastic species that we find in our seas in a series of images made by means of the cyanotype photographic process, also known as blueprint. We took the collected waste to the photography laboratory and we created photograms through physical contact. It is an artistic, documentary and critical project that aims to inform, signify and reflect on the impact of human presence on the environment. This is all done by harnessing the potential of artistic expression to generate social bonds as well as to facilitate collective action and citizen agency (Fowles, S., and J. Arterberry. 2013. “Gesture and performance in Comanche rock art.” World Art 3: 67–82.; DeMarrais, E., and J. Robb. 2013. “Art makes society: an introductory visual essay.” World Art 3 (1): 3–22.).

Altered spaces: new ways of seeing and envisioning nature with Minecraft

The climate crisis has inspired youth-led activism across the world and young people now lead global campaigns and political protest on climate justice. However, aside from news media coverage of youth activism and the attendant focus on young people’s hand-drawn protest placards, relatively little is known about young people’s views on the actions needed to respond to the climate crisis or how they imagine environmentally-sustainable futures. This visual essay addresses that lacuna by exploring young people’s ideas about local climate actions. The images selected for consideration were created using Minecraft, the 3D block-building visualisation game, at workshops held in Ireland. Young people and their families were invited to create environmentally-sustainable futures at Minecraft workshops. Exploring these 3D designs as images, the essay documents young people’s visual representations of desirable climate actions and reflects on these Minecraft images to shed light on how young people envision alternative climate futures. These collective visions, or climate imaginaries, are powerful indicators of what young people imagine is possible in the future. In doing so, they present an alternative to the mainstream news and entertainment media preoccupation with dystopian constructions of the climate crisis. They also highlight the power of Minecraft as a visual medium to open up new ways of seeing nature and of envisioning nature-society relations. The selected images were also exhibited as part of the CLIMATE LOOK Lab 2022 held at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. The gallery invited researchers, community groups and artists to use the gallery as a lab space to engage visitors with our changing environment and to explore how images can change the visual narrative on climate change.

Ethics of dust: visual essay on the artistic works by Jorge Otero-Pailos

Ethics of dust: visual essay on the artistic works by Jorge Otero-Pailos

Visualising gendered space and informality: a photo essay

In this visual essay, I engage with the use of public and parochial realms by male and female vendors in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using data from a qualitative case study in Sattola slum and its surrounding public spaces in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this visual essay examines the ways in which male and female vendors use of space varies due to the gendered nature of space. The findings suggest that female vendors mostly use parochial realm due to the gendered nature of public space.

Let Dr Ai’s story flee: a minor practice against China’s internet censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic

This visual essay adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual constellation revolving around the notion of minor language to analyze the minor texts that Chinese netizens created to bypass China’s Internet censorship and continuously circulated Chinese Dr Fen Ai’s interview about the early outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan. The essay argues that the netizen’s minor texts deterritorialise the major or standard use of the Chinese language online and enable Dr Ai’s story to flee the realm of representation. The anti-censorship relay campaign spontaneously launched by China’s Internet users has become a noticeable visual event in China’s social media space.

Susana Distancia: memes and popular culture during the COVID-19 pandemic

Between the end of March and June 2020, COVID-19 quickly spread in Mexico. As a response, the Mexican government announced its national prevention campaign, called ‘Susana Distancia,’ a set of measures, recommendations, conferences, educational resources, and a chatbot. At the centre of the campaign was Susana Distancia’s character, a young woman designed in a comic-book-style, echoing the Mexican lucha libre heroes, who recommended keeping 1.5 m (6 feet) of physical distance to prevent contagion. In the following visual essay, we analyse Susana Distancia’s role, from its institutional origins to its later transformation as a popular culture meme. Based on the Latin American theory of the popular, we argue that the Susana Distancia, as a meme, used various mechanisms to support and challenge the institutional discourse. In this sense, Susana Distancia can be considered a meme that embraces the popular: a cultural artefact that travels across different languages, spaces, and rituals, from cyberspace to the streets, from governmental intentions to everyday performativity. When we use lo popular as a category, we refer to the possibility of enacting subaltern narratives in aesthetic and ethical terms. Multiple readings and manifestations of Susana Distancia demonstrate popular culture as a means of travelling through diverse semantic appropriations. Various forms of popular culture: the politised, the artistic, the erotic, the authentic, the mainstream, and the political, converge in the translation of meaning, from the institutional discourse to the lived experiences of the Mexican population.

Short videos as affective contagion: (Un)locked WeChat chatlogs on viral videos

This visual essay is a documentation of a series of morbid short videos circulating in local Wuhan chat groups at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, attached with video screenshots and adjacent chatlogs. The data was collected during the author's home quarantine in Wuhan in early 2020. This visual essay aims at viscerally exhibiting the circulation of emotions ranging from anxiety to boredom to lethargy via group conversations surrounding these short videos. Hopefully, they can serve as an archive and a miniature of a societal meltdown that is readily forgotten.

The rhythms of cancer survivorship

This visual essay incorporates photographs from a research project on the changing landscapes of cancer survivorship in Australia. Study participants were asked to tell the story of what cancer looks and feels like and what it means to them. The photographs were captioned and discussed during a follow-up interview. Employing Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, these photographs, captions and narrations show how the routines and expectations arising in cancer survivorship reorient life around movement in time and place. They provide insights into the unfolding of cancer survivorship in the ebb and flow of lived experience.

Thrownapartness – a view from Al-Quds/Jerusalem

This visual essay introduces the concept of ‘thrownapartness’ as an embedded logic of contemporary urbanization, existing in dialectical tension with ‘throwntogetherness’. Tracing the working of urban walls, displacement and abandonment on the fringes of Al-Quds/Jerusalem provides a stark contrast to the perceived image of cities as hubs of mixing, toleration and liberalism. In Al-Quds, as in a growing number of cities, minorities and marginalized groups are commonly racialized, displaced and segregated, creating a colonial regime of de-facto urban apartheid. In such settings, Doreen Massey's concept of ‘throwntogetherness’ appears like a distant mirage, with its portrayal of flexibility, indifference and coexistence (albeit within an exploitive political economy and oppressive ‘power geometries’). In times of rapid change and multiple crises, the putative ‘threat’ from ‘unwanted’ or ‘deeply different’ groups harbored in urban space drives authorities to use colonial separation strategies, such as ghettoization or ‘gray spacing’ which minimize or prevent encounters. Such settings, we argue, require critical attention to ‘urban thrownapartness’ – a concept that extends Massey's formulations of ‘throwntogetherness’, in order to better fathom the workings of contemporary cities.

COVID-19 Anxiety - Location, Refuge, and Loss: A Visual Essay

COVID-19 Anxiety - Location, Refuge, and Loss: A Visual Essay

In and Out of Focus: An Urban Lens on COVID-19 in the Global South

How has COVID-19 affected the everyday lives of citizens in the global South? Through a visual narrative, this photographic essay brings forth the impact that the pandemic has had on the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor that has been ‘out of focus’, ranging from the urban emptiness of vacated streets to the hands-on community spirit to help those in need. This visual essay uses imagery sourced from city partners within the KNOW programme, to depict and compare urban realities before (in focus) and during (out of focus) the pandemic. By visually presenting the people and places in pre-pandemic circumstances, this piece juxtaposes localised lived experiences, alongside the disruption, inherent solidarity and urban inequalities that have arisen during the progression of the pandemic in the global South.

Film as Fabric: A visual essay signalling the importance of clothing in expanded cinema performance

In this visual essay, I discuss how clothing made for an expanded cinema performance entitled Film as Fabric took on significance. The live work shows analogue film as fabric and stitching as editing to highlight historical relationships between textile practice and experimental filmmaking. The work developed through iterations from 2013 to 2017 as a part of doctorate research carried out from 2012 to 2020. My position as an experimental filmmaker with a background in embroidery grounded the study. Annabel Nicolson’s seminal live expanded cinema performance Reel Time (1973), in which she punctured 16mm film with her unthreaded sewing machine, was also a point of departure. Feminist critique from both disciplines – film and textile studies – supported the possibility of repressed relationships between the fields. Feminist scholars have repeatedly problematized contextualization of experimental filmmaking as narrow and misplaced (Blaetz 2007; Hatfield 2006; Reynolds 2009, ; ). Until now, connections with textile practice in experimental filmmaking have been largely overlooked, most likely because domestic crafts have a long association with women’s work (), are central to deep rooted Western stereotypes of femininity, and remain denigrated art forms (). The development of Film as Fabric led to the creation of hybrid tools, forms and gestures, such as optical sounds and moving images made from fabric and stitch patterns. These were measured on the body, cut with dressmaking scissors, stitched, spliced into loops and projected in former cotton mills. This process allowed sounds associated with textile production and my personal textile ancestry to re-surface in new ways. The live context demands attention is given to material practices, which typically take place out of sight in the home and the film cutting room and have also recently undergone significant shifts in cultural status.

Hypernormal Films for Postnormal Times: The Documentary Dance of Adam Curtis

Since the early 1990s, documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has created landmark, multi-episode series for the BBC that explore the emotional and social impact of change in dominant forms of power, communication and control. Together, his ambitious visual essays compose a secret history of technology-driven modernity, as a managerial model of radical individualism governed by data-gathering and surveillance replaces traditional mass politics. This process, which Curtis calls “hypernormalisation,” has affinities with the conception of “postnormal times” developed by Ziauddin Sardar. However, the two visions differ in significant ways, while Curtis’s analysis shows signs of evolving as flaws emerge in the stable systems his work foregrounds.

A visual legacy: William Crocker’s ethnographic archive

Dr William Crocker began field research with the Canela (Maranhão state, Brazil) in 1957 and continued to do so intermittently until 2011 – a total of more than 54 years in an unprecedented long-term commitment to a field research programme in social anthropology. As soon as he arrived among the Canela, he began intensive documentation of their life. Photography and film played a major part in his observations and his use of these media proved extremely innovative in ethnographic study. Crocker produced one of the most detailed and accurate sets of visual documents about Lowland South American community life ever collected. This visual essay surveys this important ethnographic archival data (film footage, fields notes and photographs) and briefly analyses his visual enterprise, discussing the circumstances under which the images were taken, the ideas which informed them, and the general methods employed in making them. An interview I conducted with Crocker (2015) enriches our understanding of the collection.

The Cinematic Poetry of Four New York Carousels

This visual essay explores the relationships between three contemporary carousels and one antique that was restored, and it examines their renaissance as key design features in the urban context of New York City. It depicts the carousels as a repository of inhabitable illusion, which will continue to be shaped by the many visitors to the parks where they are located. This essay explores the spatial order that these carousels create, evoking an awareness of our own childhood experiences and the important part they played in the development of our visual arts through light, motion and sound. Background

Rebranding the nation: Performances of 1821

This visual essay discusses some of the performances celebrating the bicentenary of the Greek War of Independence. Ranging from historical reenactments to deconstructive appropriations and ironic adaptations, the performative renderings of 1821 challenged the tangibility of the past and the nation’s cultural expectations, creating an intriguing landscape of conflicted interests.

THE ART OF THE FACEMASKS A COLLECTIVE REFLECTION OF COLLEGE LIFE DURING COVID

This visual essay presents selected results of a coursework project, namely an artistic exploration into the practice of compulsory wearing protective masks, conducted by the University of Alaska Anchorage students during the first wave of COVID.

Remote justice: a visual essay on the response of the Dutch justice system to the COVID-19 pandemic

The measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 significantly impacted (criminal) justice sectors worldwide, including the justice system in the Netherlands. The administration of justice could no longer take place in physical court meetings. Many cases could not be processed. Behind the scenes, people worked hard to scale up the technological infrastructure needed and make court buildings COVID-proof. Necessary (emergency) legislation was created in consultation with stakeholders. The Dutch judiciary speeded up the implementation and use of videoconferencing, including the criminal courts. Over time, lawyers and court reporters became critical in the (social) media. They pointed to problems with respect to organisation, technology, communication, and legal principles. The principle of a fair trial, more specifically the principle of equality of arms, risked being violated. Equality of arms means that the public prosecutor and the defence must have equal opportunities to convince the court. These opportunities differ by the means (modality) by which a person is present. Many of us have experienced how different on-screen communication is from in-person contact, affecting what and who can be seen and heard. This is also the case for people who are digitally or physically present in court, either as a professional (e.g. lawyer and prosecutor) or as citizen (e.g. suspect and victim). Other fundamental rights were affected as well. The time slots for videoconferencing, organised by prisons, to allow suspects and their lawyers to participate from prison were problematic. Another challenge was to safeguard the public nature of the judiciary, the public access to the courts. This visual essay describes the response of the Dutch justice system to the pandemic over time and incorporates images that present several practices of seeing, looking, and showing. According to several organisations, actors, and legal professionals working in the justice system worldwide, trial by screen is here to stay.