On Catastrophe: Visual Reflections and Practices

This special issue aims to gather both analytical studies on the contributions of individual works or productions, and cross-sectional analysis paths of practices or productions on how visual has rethought the idea of catastrophe, whether in ways akin to or radically divergent from hegemonic narratives. With the intention of exploring and promoting diverse forms of practice and thought, alongside critical and theoretical essays, the project also welcomes visual essays and dialogue formats - conversations with filmmakers, artists, curators and other protagonists - through which, in the crossings of gazes, intentions, issues and outcomes of artistic effort may emerge in polyvocal form, as materialised in the artistic, cinematic and curatorial poetics under discussion. The issue aims to engage with the fertile mutual contamination generated within artistic and media production by the encounter between environmental approaches to the Human and Social Sciences, and postcolonial and decolonial reflections and practices that traverse Political ecology, Cultural, Gender and Queer studies, Indigenous, Black and Critical race studies. Within this framework, the centrality of notions such as “body” and “territory” as material realities and sites of asymmetric, physical and epistemic occupations, is accompanied by a vision of society and human history as necessarily environmental, that is, always originating within the interdependence between the human and the non-human.