Weaving worlds

Abstract

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.

How do we get to know the world and how do we locate ourselves within it? These are crucial questions for visual, spatial and sensorial practices that seek to engage in emancipatory projects. In this themed issue, we are concerned with how to think and work across what might at first sight seem to be incommensurate worlds. We follow a line of thought from the Zapatista’s declaration, ‘The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit’ to the pluriversal thinking that this demand has inspired, including the adoption of Indigenous and ecological philosophy within the Western academy (Zapatista declaration quoted from De la Cadena and Blaser, 2018; Escobar, 2018). In following this line of thought, we do not reproduce the contours of the arguments for and against the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropological theory, instead we think through the practices that allow a creative negotiation across disparate worlds (De Castro, 1998; Graeber, 2015; Henare et al., 2009). The themed issue moves from this concern with working across incommensurability to addressing how the incommensurable returns to haunt our collective constructed worlds. We follow Avery Gordon’s (2008: xvi) definition of haunting as that which, ‘raises specters [that] appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view’. Such spectres are present across all articles appearing in discussions around the ongoing processes of extraction, dispossession and colonialism.

As the articles move across varied and diverse geographies, a number of crucial questions have emerged repeatedly. Firstly, how to join in pluriversal thought from the places and spaces we currently inhabit, often working in the colonized world with one foot in the imperial knowledge infrastructures of the North/West. Secondly, from all of our compromised and compromising positions, how to bring our affective and political engagements alongside the ethnographic encounters sanctioned by academic knowledge production? That is to say, how to bring situated knowledge to the table that has been gained in conversation with others, without parsing it through traditional academic criteria of what counts as evidence. The articles in this issue do not speak from one perspective or disciplinary space, but evoke different positionalities that are often in discomfort, posed and poised between varied worlds, practices and disciplines. They embrace the tension between affect and evidence that permeates throughout the themed issue and leads us to reorient the question of how to imagine a world of many worlds. Both affect and evidence are at play in the different articles, but are mobilized very differently and are put to the test in the diverse contexts the authors write from. We understand this as an engagement with how we see and the forms of abstraction we call upon in order to apprehend the world. In this sense, we follow Katherine McKittrick’s (2021: 12) call to ‘get in touch with the materiality of our analytical worlds’ as each article speaks from its own situated positionality. Within the themed issue, this materiality appears in descriptions of contexts that the authors speak from, ranging across the digital, the subterranean, mines, mountains, watery territories, exhibition spaces, a book and a story.

While abstract thought may generally be understood within the Western modality of a unitary and unified knowledge, the genealogy of thinking we are working with demonstrates that there are many heterogenous forms of abstraction thriving across cultures as popular knowledge. As Mohaghegh and Stone (2017: x) write in their call for a ‘radical unreality’, ‘the literary and aesthetic vanguards of the non-West are no less than masters of abstraction. They are in turn macabre, phantasmatic, absurd, intoxicating, monstrous.’ Notwithstanding the hyperbolic tone of the quote, there is something here about bringing other realms of experience into the way we consider reality that remains important for us to think through. It could be the companion to what Sylvia Wynter (1990) calls ‘demonic grounds’ when writing with the experience of Black women as not only inhabiting the margins. In Katherine McKittrick’s (2006: 135) words, demonic grounds are for Wynter a creative place from which to ‘fashion a workable and new politics’. This resonates with Genova’s (2025) argument in this issue where she suggests that abstraction and experimentation form twins, two sides of the same coin. Across this issue, the recognition and naming of different modes of abstraction and experimentation have ranged from the subversion of dominant aesthetics and modes of representation to building alliances that matter.

This themed issue emerged from questions and ideas that were discussed during the summer of 2023 at the conference, Weaving Worlds: Speculations between Affect and Evidence, at the Faculty of Architecture in TU Delft. ¹ The conference brought together academics, architects, artists and activists, all interested in the way we engage with an increasingly complex world and the forms of mediation required to do so. At the time, we were specifically interested in questions of evidence, affect and speculation, and in 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. They have also become key tools for both the production and analysis of visual culture. In this sense, we were interested in what an intensive practice of mapping, modelling and sensing would look like and how to narrate such practices as forms of visual culture.

While the practice of mapping has been thoroughly deconstructed, as can be discerned in the use of terms such as counter/radical cartography, counter mapping, etc., within the realm of the digital many familiar problems have returned in a different guise. They appear as externalized reference points, immutable base maps, or simply our own unacknowledged presence. The digital realm also produces representations of worlds that are all encompassing, where paradigms of existence beyond the statistical, capitalist and imperial logic of the model are difficult to imagine (Galloway, 2014). Such technologies have enabled new forms of colonization and are complicit in the ending of many lifeworlds. Approaching mapping, modelling and sensing through a pluriversal lens led us to ask how we might transform our practices to apprehend heterogeneous, material and situated worlds. What might it mean to know the world through multiple reference points? If maps and stories are tools that conceptualize ways of knowing and aid navigation, how might we produce them differently to help us place ourselves within multiple constellations? The articles in this issue engage these questions without assuming a stable or given knowledge field from which to draw responses. Instead they centre their specific geographies and positions as responses to conventional forms of mapping and modelling. They consider affect, relation, paranoia and collaboration, and as suggested earlier, include a deeper engagement with materiality.

At a time when evidentiary practices have been positioned as an antidote to a ‘post-truth’ world, we asked how to mobilize other ways of knowing. Wendy Chun (2015), in writing about the fraught politics of climate change, suggests that, while we might have to work with unknowable risks that are in many ways incalculable, these should not be understood as being beyond estimation. Working with the estimable means moving beyond a logic of pre-emption and optimization that only ends up reproducing a world based on narrow understandings of risk and threat, or of cause and effect. Instead, estimation leads to a realm of speculation and stories that work with multiple truths and actively envision other realities (Tyszczuk, 2019). In this sense, a critical approach to visual culture and spatial relations might not only analyse the modelled spaces of standards, practices and computational geometries, but would also deploy ‘agential cuts’ (Barad, 2007) through the extractive geometries of digital modelling to reveal thick surfaces for action and alternative interpretations. How might we reimagine the practice of representation as a turn towards this thick surface that we always already inhabit, and how might we account for the ‘racialized assemblages’ and ‘heavy waves and vibrations’ of life that run through it? (McKittrick and Weheliye, 2017: 13; Weheliye, 2014). For us, this has meant giving precedence to different ways of knowing the world, to other forms of intelligence and a commitment to developing forms of practice that weave together what might be contradictory positions into future scenarios. It also suggests different modes of apprehending the world, or entering into fields of vision that are murky and unclear.

Weaving as creativity and abstraction

In putting together the conference and this themed issue, weaving became both a metaphor and a practice for imagining the entanglements that hold our complex and contradictory worlds together. Weaving encompasses the histories of trade connections across faraway lands and is implicated in colonial domination and the changing histories of subjugated peoples (Beckert, 2015). Weaving is also a play with material and form, an embodied act that demands an attunement to processes in-formation (Ingold, 2010). It is both a laborious and imaginative process that requires experimentation, rigour and painstaking labour. Weaving is often women’s work within households across the industrializing world (Honeyman, 2000), a familial labour sometimes valorized as heritage across the South (Bose, 2024). The contemporary story of weaving is one of its continuing relevance in the face of capitalist transformation and consumerism (Martinez, 2015) precisely because weaving is a technology and a mode of storytelling: a religious, cultural and economic practice all together (Edwards, 2010; Knobblock, 2022). Weaving is both repetition and creation; abstraction and pattern-building. To weave new worlds, then, would mean paying equal attention to the binary tendencies of the technology of weaving as weft and warp and also to the way weaving in many cultures is both the production of textile surfaces and the weaving of stories as (often) women sit together and speculate on alternative pasts and other futures. Like other forms of narrative building, the person who weaves is intrinsically connected to that which is woven.

The tapestry of this themed issue is produced through only a selection of the wonderful presentations that took place across the two days of the conference. Those that are included here follow more closely a strand of speculative thinking that suggests that the relation between past, present and future is entwined, reflecting a sense of urgency about how we perceive the world around us. This urgency is not only in relation to the Anthropocene, as has become fashionable in academia, but rather a confrontation with violence and genocide as constitutive conditions of our times and the conditionality of our changing climate futures (Malm, 2016, 2024). Following Andreas Ballestero (2019: 27) these could be called ‘future histories’, encompassing technologies and practices that do not just talk about what the future can be, but rather ‘act in the present with all its constraints and limitations’ (see also Knox, 2020). Speaking from diverse contexts and geographies of extraction, many of the articles address, directly or indirectly, forms of scientific mapping and modelling that construct the natural and non-human world as a resource, but each article grapples with this differently. Together they challenge the hierarchical technicity that is associated with projects of domination and emancipation, and the ways in which these are often inextricably linked together. By technicity, we mean, the relation of technology, the human and the non-human (Barla, 2018; Simondon, 2017), and following Latour (2002) we also explore why technology is always associated with mastery. Many of the articles trace historical and contemporary practices that show that this association between technology and forms of dominance understood through what is couched as expert knowledge is always contingent and specific.

The articles gathered here all engage with visual culture as one mode of engaging and intervening in politics; some consider mapping as a concrete practice that allows different claims to be brought together in ways that do not elide the entangled and contingent nature of spatial claims, while others are concerned with the aesthetic vocabularies and underlying frameworks that often go unacknowledged but underpin our view of the world. They formulate different relationships through which a new vocabulary emerges that moves from analysis and evidence to that of sensing, hearing, murkiness, movement, strata, hauntings and djinns, amongst others. Taking such a vocabulary seriously, the themed issue attempts to dig deeper into what constitutes the relation between the real and the unreal, or what Mohaghegh and Stone (2017) call a ‘radical unreality’. It highlights creativity, experimentation, abstraction, affect and intimacy as constitutive features of relationships across the material, human and spectral world, addressing the possibility of there being more than what we can see, count and account for.

Across different articles, what emerges as a response and strategy is a will and desire to communicate across difference. By communication, we are referring to the multiple different modes of legibility and illegibility across differences of language, culture and situation, and the forms of translation that allow a negotiation across them. As Singh et al. (2023) point out, translation is not just a domain of expertise; there also exist centuries of experience of translation as an everyday activity across regions outside of the Euro-centric world. In this issue, there are many different languages at play, from the spoken to the visual, as well as languages of care within crumbling economies and violent infrastructures, all of which require different modes of attention. For example, while for Awan and Blackmore, it might be the affect of Urdu within exhibition spaces that creates a moment of connection, for Duncan and Levy, it manifests in their exchange across the fraught politics of imagery. For Hussain and Riaz, as well as for Gambino and Sharma, language and communication are tied to the politics and materiality of the ground. For Reisinger, the communication that matters is between her field and her disciplinary and academic world. Sensing, for Uludağ, acts as a form of communication in relation to elemental matters that constitute the earth’s materiality, while Dada takes us to a digital materiality where all known forms of knowledge claims can be obfuscated. Both Dada and Jundi speak from a place (digital and otherwise) where communication and language collapse within fraught political contexts. Genova takes us into the realm of stories and the possibility of cross-species communication.

Many different threads connect the articles and certain patterns are repeated across them. Rather than grouping them into thematic boxes, we have instead followed one possible thread that connects one article to another. We briefly spell out these connections, inviting you, the reader, to build your own pattern. The first contribution sets the stage for speaking across geographies, while eschewing comparison as method. From within the watery territories of Georgia and Kutch in India, Evelina Gambino and Ishita Sharma think through a-grammatical relations (De la Cadena, 2015) that bring incommensurability into view. They discuss the aftermath of infrastructural transformations across their twin locations through focusing on local vocabularies for environmental relations. Their article suggests that how we name environmental relations makes a difference to the extractive grammars that are used to justify infrastructural interventions. Rather than focusing on the many ways that water has been commodified and controlled, they discuss local ways of engaging with water and ground as lively matter. Centring communication and translation as an engaged practice that requires constant work, they think through how situated vocabularies and people’s intimacy and affection for place can yield better understandings.

Staying with the ground and situated landscapes, we travel from valley and gulf to mountains where Zahra Hussain and Somana Riaz cross into a different ontological space, sharing methodologies of mapping devised with the human and non-human communities of the Hindu-Kush Himalaya. Hussain and Riaz’s embodied practice requires an attunement of senses to varied presences, human, non-human and spectral. Unearthing different forms of relation and connection, Hussain and Riaz suggest that stratification can be a mode of generating knowledge and thinking across temporalities. They share their experience of mapping tools and strategies that accommodate and react in relation to human and non-human perceptions of place. The mapping process reveals multiple formations of time and alternative narratives of survival and maintenance in the face of anthropogenic change. Both of these opening articles, arising from different methods and inclinations, find that lively formations are an intrinsic quality of subterranean and watery grounds.

The next article by Aslı Uludağ revolves similarly on the subterranean and geologic, but with an emphasis on sense-making – a different modality of accessing the world. Uludağ’s work explores the knowledge systems that create and sustain the uses of geothermal energy in the provinces of Aydın, Manisa and Denizli in Turkey. The article follows the author’s travels in these provinces, exploring the contesting uses of the earth’s energy as a geothermal resource. Similar to the previous articles, it pays attention to the relation between people, strata and the larger environment. Uludağ suggests sense-making as a practice by which both local communities and geologists engage with geothermal potentialities. These practices, as she suggests, are not as radically different as they might seem at first sight. The scientific tradition builds on local knowledge, even as it de-legitimizes it, but local sensemaking practices, in turn, trouble the assumed objectivity that underlies the geological project of resource extraction.

Moving to a different temporality and geography of extraction, Karin Reisinger’s article is situated in iron ore mining regions of the Austrian Alps and Sábme, Indigenous Sámi lands in northern Sweden. Describing her work since 2016 with local communities, Reisinger thinks through what she has learnt about living with extractivism and dealing with loss, and how these learnings sit within a feminist tradition in architecture. Bringing together feminist and new materialist writers with theories gleaned through her engagement with local practitioners, Lena Sjötoft and Margit Anttila from the Northern mining community of Gällivare, Reisinger’s article introduces practices of counter cartography. These culminate in maps that make visible the complexity of changes that occur in regions that have seen decades of mining. As a form of mapping, textile and embroidery become a way of visiblizing and articulating memories of places that no longer exist. As Reisinger suggests, her Indigenous interlocutors work against extractivist modes of segregation and fragmentation by focusing on social and collective regeneration and reproduction in a place consumed by narratives of extraction.

The following article by Mustapha Jundi offers a wholly different approach to mapping. Jundi proposes paranoic mapping as critical visual practice in the underground border geographies of Lebanon and Israel. In his article, we encounter a different kind of countermapping that lays bare the conditions of knowledge production and an affective mode of engaging with the world that arises from violence and the constrained conditions brought about by protracted geopolitical conflict. Jundi thinks with unknowing as a constitutive element within certain forms of knowledge production. Located at the Lebanese–Israel border, Jundi discusses practices of mapping and sensing subterranean water resources next to the deliberate withholding of data and obfuscation by hostile states. Describing the difficulty of navigating through these often violent relations, Jundi reveals the centrality of paranoia as a key affect within his work, and as a form of navigation across violence and authoritarianism. Like other articles in this issue, Jundi engages with the materiality of the subterranean and of water. The article heightens questions of abstraction, objectivity, affect, sensing and intimacy that are at the core of the questions explored in this themed issue.

These questions are related to how we each construct the worlds that we inhabit and the next article addresses how collective worlds are produced and inhabited within the digital realm. In the current context of social media platforms refusing to fact check and validate sources, Maria Dada considers the possibility of creating counter-narratives based on a similar strategy of obfuscation. Thinking with Sylvia Wynter’s (1992, 2003) oeuvre, Dada proposes ‘modelling darkly’ as a form of counter-figuration that could resist discourses shaped by hegemonic, often Western-centric and masculinist frameworks. As online communities become evermore politicized and caught within smaller and smaller circles of influence, the gap between what might count as empirical reality and the overwhelming complexity of the world produces a situation where the line between fact and fiction dissipates. Dada’s reflections, as well as those of the following article, act as a warning; while worlds may be disparate and incommensurable, the need to counter certain imaginaries remains, as does the imperative to make connections through the forms of communication we discussed earlier.

Duncan and Levy wade further into murky watery depths. Coming back to the themes of water, the subterranean and submergence that previous articles have addressed, they question the origins of watery visual regimes by foregrounding the tangled and murky nature of ‘water, vision and power’. They ask, ‘What happens when fascism encounters the sea?’ (p. 20). Rather than the clarity of some forms of underwater imagery, they propose the turbid image as a form and politics of representation, but specifying the particularity of this term to their context, rather than as a catchword that can be used across contexts. Themes of submergence, clarity and abstraction reoccur, framed as a counter-response to a specific fascist visual rhetoric. Both theirs and Dada’s article foreground the ‘collective production of social reality’ (Dada, this issue) and counter responses to them.

The last two articles in this themed issue conceptually expand upon some of the themes we have grappled with above. They consider the back-and-forth movement between affect and evidence that unites the varied approaches presented in the issue. As Neda Genova writes in her article on Philip Pullman’s classic His Dark Materials, knowing is not just a matter of methodology nor is it a matter of favouring the qualitative over the quantitative, since one can follow an evidence-based approach to ethnography and can equally consider the affective qualities of statistics. Instead, both articles portray a sensibility that acknowledges the role of abstraction as well as of imagination in knowledge-making practices. Genova carries forward the themed issue’s interest in vision and knowledge production by taking as example the creation of the ‘amber spyglass’ in Book Three of the Trilogy. Genova compellingly argues for abstraction as a productive quality, and explores its relation to situatedness and experimentation, coming back to the question of difference and incommensurability that we began this themed issue introduction with. She thinks through these questions also in relation to our ecological futures.

We close the issue with Awan and Blackmore’s ‘Vignette as a way of seeing’, situating these questions within our contemporary contexts and the hauntings (Gordon, 2008) that we are faced with today. As Awan and Blackmore allude to at the beginning of their article, what does academic work do, what forum (Forensic Architecture, 2014) does it act in when genocide and censorship have continued in the face of strong public opposition? Their article thinks through the ethical implications of witnessing and of refusing to witness in the context of their exhibition that follows journeys of undocumented migration and displacement. Situated within the experience of curating an exhibition and its slippages of politics, form, representation and language, they posit the vignette as an instance of ethical documentation that (again, following a theme that runs across the articles) works against the desire to make complex lives reducible and explainable. Situating themselves as engaged participants, witnesses and researchers, the article demands a stronger recognition and articulation of our role as actors and agents in the escalating violence and emancipatory politics that arise from these difficult times.

We want to end this introduction by remembering Gökçe Önal. Gökçe, a researcher and PhD candidate from Turkey at TU Delft, was a friend, comrade and part of the organizing team of the conference. Her article was meant to be part of this themed issue, before we lost her, as the issue was nearing completion. The process of putting together this issue has shown us that loss in multiple forms is incommensurable and cannot be accounted for, nor is anything spoken ever enough. We feel her presence with us and we hope that her ideas and works live many lives.