Facing Exclusion: Towards a Critical Pedagogy of the Image

Abstract

This article offers a critical reflection on images as contested territories within contemporary dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Confronting systems of exclusion that operate through representation, we propose shifting from the politics of the gaze toward the materiality of images, understanding their surfaces as sites of exchange and transformation where tensions between visibility and invisibility are played out. Imagination operates as a political and material faculty, transindividual in nature, capable of reconfiguring existing images and opening possibilities for resistance against the precarization of life. We seek an imagination that unexpectedly seeps through the cracks of the materiality of images, enabling the generation of further images and working with material resistances as critical openings. Through research-creation processes developed with students from diverse disciplines who do not necessarily come from the artistic field, we developed pedagogical devices for materially intervening in images. We privileged video as a pedagogical tool given its essayistic character, which enabled us to generate reflective gestures that draw upon the political potency of the poor image and an amateur attitude. We present three examples of student works that address issues of gender exclusion and body politics from feminist perspectives, exploring forms of contemporary iconoclasm. The proposed pedagogies seek to activate a shared imagination that generates openings toward new collective relations. This opens the possibility to imagine futures in the face of threatened modes of existence.