Poetics, Imaginaries, and Decolonial Aesthesis: Iconographies of Resistance in Design and the Visual Culture of the Global South

Abstract

This article explores how visual languages and design practices serve as tools of epistemic resistance to Eurocentric hegemony, proposing a rupture with the continental and linear thinking of modernity. Drawing upon archipelagic thinking, rooted in Afro-diasporic philosophies, the study advocates multiplicity, subjectivity, and the pluriverse as fundamental critical alternatives. The theoretical framework is grounded in the debate over the three dimensions of coloniality — power, knowledge, and being — and draws on the work of Global South intellectuals such as Aníbal Quijano, Bispo dos Santos, and Ailton Krenak to substantiate the concepts of “decoloniality” and “counter-coloniality”. From this perspective, interculturality and confluence emerge as genuine forms of ontological resistance that recover subalternised knowledges and re-establish an integrated ecological relationship with nature. Within the field of visual culture, the article reconstructs aesthesis, mediated through Katya Mandoki’s micro-aesthetics and Paes Loureiro’s semiotic conversion, demonstrating that aesthetic expression arises directly from everyday lived experience and from mythopoetics embedded within the territory itself. On this basis, the article undertakes an iconographic analysis of the work of three contemporary artists: Harmonia Rosales, who subverts the Renaissance canon by placing Black deities at its centre; Mael Anhangá, who depicts the mystical symbiosis between the caboclo identity and the Amazon basin; and Daiara Tukano, who draws upon ancestral graphic traditions and cosmologies to affirm the sovereignty of the Earth. It is concluded that these visual manifestations converge towards the so-called “design of the margins” and towards multilateral visualities. By rejecting the purported neutrality and universality of modern industrial standards, the article redefines the role of the designer as an epistemic nomad, capable of traversing interdisciplinary and geographical boundaries to transform iconography into political symbols of re-existence, thereby opening unprecedented pathways for legitimising the knowing/being/doing of Indigenous and Afro-diasporic communities.