Visual Culture, Hegemony and Space Production

Visual Culture, Hegemony and Space Production, will examine how the image and the plan were historically mobilised as tools in the colonial organisation of space and their continuities in today’s urban development. Who owns the land, its image and thus its representation?

We will focus on the intricate relationship between visual representation, planning, colonialism, and infrastructural development.

During three distinct block seminars, we will study the image and the plan as instruments of (neo)colonial spatial organisation to understand and unlearn imperial logic within spatial disciplines, specifically the one we study, practice and reproduce: space production.

Whereas the image is an instrumental element of colonial visual language that maps, surveys, builds archives, and establishes architectural representations of dominion, the plan can’t be reduced to a merely innocent drawing; it must be understood as the translation of colonial imagineries into a physical, built concept of oppression. These seminars will analyse the mobilisation of the image and the plan in the colonial organisation of space in the name of progress and modernity. It will link past and present spatial practices to dismantle the historisation of colonial land practices and situate them within an ongoing liberal, racial, extractive, capitalist modus operandi.

However, despite the many polycrises of the past centuries, the image and the plan have been resisted, dismantled, appropriated and made obsolete to reclaim space and denounce injustices. These seminars will centre resistance as a collective backbone of the oppressed and marginalised against hegemonic visual and spatial culture.

Each block seminar is organised as workshops which will start with a collective screening followed by a discussion to foster criticality and positionality. We will learn about historical and contemporary strategies to counteract hegemonic space production using moving images. We will work together to produce a video and sonic work, which will be presented at the end of the semester. No editing skills are needed. Your offering might include multimedia material from personal or accessible public archives, critical and engaging ideas. There is no “wrong” way to contribute—share what feels urgent, in whatever form you can.

Filmography:

al-Abnudi, Atiyyat. (1981) بحار العطش Seas of Thirst, 44 min

Arsanios, Marwa. (2019) Who’s afraid of Ideology? 54 min

Diop, Mati. (2013) Mille Soleils, 45 min

Farocki, Harun. (2001) Auge/Maschine I Eye/Machine I, 25 min

Farocki, Harun. (2001) Auge/Maschine II Eye/Machine II, 15 min

Farocki, Harun. (2001) Auge/Maschine III Eye/Machine III, 16 min

Noujaim, Valentin. (2023) Pacific Club, 17 min

Pontecorvo, Gillo. (1966) The Battle of Algiers, 121 min

Sansour, Larissa. (2019) In Vitro, 28 min

Stürm Nina, Stürm Hans. (1972) Zur Wohnungsfrage, 30 min

The Otolith Group. (2018) O Horizon, 90 min

Literatur:

Azoulay, A. A., Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, New edition (Verso Books, 2024)

Badiou, A., Philosophy and the Event, 1st edition (Polity, 2013)

Farocki, H., Holert T., de Seynes E., Harun Farocki: Before Your Eyes - Vietnam / Etwas wird sichtbar (Harun Farocki Institut & Motto Books, 2017)

Goswami, N., Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (State University of New York Press, 2020)

Henni, S., Vronskaya, A., Azoulay, A. A., Al Saeed, A., Alyaqoub, A., and Kona, B., Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022)

Meziane, M. A., Adjemian, J. The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization (Verso Books, 2024)

Morton, T., Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Harvard University Press, 2009)