Call for Papers | Visual Artivisms Against Necropolitics: A Call For Artivistic Research (No. 18) | March 10, 2026 to May 24, 2026

2026-03-11

Thematic Editors: Nicoletta Mandolini (CECS, Universidade do Minho, Portugal), Dori Nigro (Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade do Porto, Portugal) e Renísia Garcia Felice (Faculdade de Educação, Universidade de Brasília, Brazil)

We live in dangerous times. Local and global conflicts increasingly erupt into wars that expose human and non-human beings to life-threatening weapons and profound trauma, leaving them to contend with a widespread lack of essential resources and services. Securitarian rhetoric, implemented through political actions fostered by emerging dictatorial and para-dictatorial regimes, compels a gradual abdication of fundamental rights in the name of fear, whether fear of others, of diseases, or of potential planetary upheavals. At the same time, technocapitalism is rapidly eroding our capacity to imagine futures in which relationality is not mediated by algorithmic logics and financial interests. Finally, climate change is already manifesting its devastating consequences through disasters that disrupt ecosystems and lives. Catastrophes frequently classified as “natural” further open the sewer of social inequalities and violently expose lives already marked by racialization (Bullard, 1993). Examples of this can be observed in consecutive floods, particularly in Global South countries, which demonstrate that certain populations are disproportionately affected. In other words, danger, far from being equally distributed among those who populate the globe, is a site where privilege manifests. Fear is a pathway for the elaboration and confrontation of traumas arising from social and racial relations that remain unresolved. It is in this sense that both Frantz Fanon (1952/2008) and Grada Kilomba (2019) problematize trauma from personal, political, and artistic perspectives, reflecting on how racism produces deadly wounds in both the psyche and the body. Achille Mbembe’s (2016) influential concept of “necropower” has helped illuminate how exposure to the risk of death is unevenly allocated. Rather than being random or uniform, such exposure is deeply entangled with the systematization of neocolonial dynamics that secure the expansion and protection of specific categories of people while simultaneously negating the right to life of others. While danger may be experienced as a common condition of hypermodernity, it often materializes in the erosion of the most fundamental of rights, the right to life, particularly for racialized individuals, as well as for women, queer and trans* subjects, who are asymmetrically exposed to contemporary forms of exploitation, systemic poverty, and widespread discrimination.

It is therefore not coincidental that it is from the Global South, among communities that remain persistently unprotected in the face of a range of potentially dreadful dynamics of social subordination and extractivism, that the concept of “re-existence” stems. Introduced by Carlos Walter Porto-Gonçalves, the idea of “re-existence” plays with the word “resistance” to describe acts of reinvention and renegotiation that facilitate the formation of new spaces for the vitality and affirmation of oppressed subjectivities (Hurtado & Porto-Gonçalves, 2022, p. 5). The same concept was later embraced by decolonial and anti-extractivist feminist thinkers who recognized its relevance for the description of the set of strategies adopted by women and gender non-conforming individuals to resist patriarchal femicidal and transfemicidal violence and its tight link with imperialist necropower in South America (Estupiñan Valencia, 2021; Glockner et al., 2024). Such practices, knowledges, and ways of doing act as forms of re-existence to the layers of the cosmogony of racial capitalism (Adeyemo & Oliver, 2020), problematizing the continuity of coloniality based on realities situated in different social contexts and reinforcing the idea that there is no future without the present; it is in the present that freedom is practiced and transformation is built (Freire, 2019).

It is precisely the idea of re-existence, and its diverse manifestations, that we seek to foreground to discuss and grant further academic visibility to the fight against necropower. Our specific focus for this special issue is on artistic activism, or artivism, and its deployment as a tool to challenge necropolitical tendencies that affect, albeit in different ways and to disturbingly different degrees, both the Global South and the Global North. Artivism simultaneously invokes poetic and political dimensions, based on the understanding that the political is inherent to artistic practice. In this sense, no artistic practice is neutral: every production implies a situated position and a stance in relation to the world. Artivisms move across both urban and digital spheres and traverse political, artistic, social, and educational fields, questioning the institutionalities and canons that structure the contemporary world (Fernandes et al., 2022). Contemporary artistic practices can play a significant role in this context by formulating questions and opening spaces for poetic and political dialogues, even in the face of the imminent dangers that mark our time. Art can create zones of listening, friction, and radical imagination, where other ways of thinking and reimagining utopias become possible.

Artistic practice, we suggest, is a site of vitality. Creativity both stems from and nourishes lively tensions, whether individual or collective. It is therefore unsurprising that art frequently converges with activism to denounce necropolitical forces and support the struggles of those who embody the idea of re-existence. Within the field of visual culture, an area of media, artistic and academic intervention that has long intersected with reflections on the operation of power relationships (e.g., Berger, 1972; Mulvey, 1989; Mirzoeff, 1999), as well as on practices of resistance to them (e.g., Herwitz, 2021; hooks, 1992), numerous artivistic projects have emerged that seek to denounce and symbolically overcome necropolitical regimes. Some of these have already received critical attention (e.g., Demos, 2020; Freitas, 2019; Ogula, 2025). However, no systematic academic intervention has specifically addressed this issue.

Art combined with activism constitutes the primary object of study and discussion of this themed issue, as well as the main method of analysis of the scholarly efforts we would like to host in this issue of Vista. Situated within an academic journal devoted to the analysis of visual cultures, this issue necessarily prompts reflections on the connection between artivistic operations and research practices. At a time when both artistic activism/artivism (Correch, 2019; Groys, 2014; Lacy, 2010; Serafini, 1999) and artistic research (Capous-Desyllas & Morgaine, 2018; Lacey, 2020; McLeod & Holdridge, 2006) are widely recognized and explored as productive intersections, we propose a further convergence under the notion of “artivistic research” which informs and shapes our editorial choices. In this context, artistic practices become not only spatio-temporal sites of enunciation, where still-open traumas and wounds can be elaborated, but also emerge as spaces capable of expanding debates drawn from situated experiences within self-managed communities of the Global South regarding counter-colonization (Santos, 2015, 2023). In these practices, gesturalities, corporealities, and ancestralities are invoked, contributing to a deeper reflection on broader social public policies.

With this thematic issue, we aim not only to acknowledge and critically examine artivistic practices against necropolitics, but also to actively encourage them by accepting contributions that, while preserving academic rigor, are not confined to the canonical models of academic writing and (phal)logocentric thinking. By opening space to experimental, hybrid, and practice-based forms of knowledge production, this issue seeks to recognize artistic research and artivistic practices as entangled and legitimate modes of inquiry and political engagement, capable of challenging dominant epistemologies and resisting necropolitical forms of power.

We welcome academic articles, visual essays, and other hybrid contributions that engage critically with the relationship among artivism, re-existence, and resistance to necropolitical forces.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Visual artivism and practices of re-existence
  • Visual culture and necropolitics
  • Decolonial and anti-extractivist artistic practices engaging with the realm of the visual
  • Gendered and queer politics of re-existence through visual artivism
  • Ecological visual artivism
  • Visual artivism and migration
  • Digital visual artivism against technocapitalism
  • Artivism as a pedagogical practice in the field of visual arts
  • Artivism, corporealities, and new visualities
  • Artivisms, eco- and technoperformances in the field of visual culture

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission (full manuscript): from March 10, 2026 to May 24, 2026

Journal publication date: continuous edition (July to December 2026)

LANGUAGE

The manuscripts may be submitted in English or Portuguese. Papers selected for publication will be translated into Portuguese or English and must be published in both languages.

EDITING AND SUBMISSION

Vista is an open-access academic journal following demanding peer-review standards based on a double-blind review process. After submission, the papers will be forwarded to two reviewers, previously invited to evaluate them according to their academic quality, originality, and relevance to the journal's objectives and scope.

Originals must be submitted through the journal's website (https://revistavista.pt/). If you are accessing Vista for the first time, you must register before submitting your article (instructions for registration here).

The guidelines for authors are available here.

For further information, please contact: vista@ics.uminho.pt

References

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Capous-Desyllas, M., & Morgaine, K. (Eds.). (2018). Creating social change through creativity: Anti-oppressive art-based research methodologies. Palgrave.

Correch, M. (2019). Decolonizing artivism. Nuart Journal, 1(2), 104–106.

Demos, T. J. (2020). Blackout: The necropolitics of extraction. In E. Steinbock, B. Ieven, & M. de Valck (Eds.), Art and activism in the age of systemic crises: Aesthetic resilience (pp. 43–67). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012252-004

Estupiñan Valencia, D. (2021). Victims of development, Afrourban communities, and dynamics of re-existence in Buenaventura. In S. Federici, L. Mason-Deese, & S. Draper (Eds.), Femicide and global accumulation: Frontline struggles to resist the violence of patriarchy and capitalism (pp. 28–36). Common Notions.

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Freitas, M. (2019). Os corpos dissidentes de gênero nas artes visuais como reação à necropolítica. Hipocampo. https://hipocampo.space/os-corpos-dissidentes-de-genero-nas-artes-visuais-como-reacao-a-necropolitica/

Glockner, V., Borzacchiello, E., Torres, R. M., Faria, C., Danze, A., Herrera-Martínez, E., García-Figueroa, G., & Niño-Vega, N. (2024). The cuerpo territorio of displacement: A decolonial feminist geopolitics of re-existencia. Geopolitics, 29(4), 1220–1244. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2213639

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Lacy, S. (2010). Leaving art: Writings on performance, politics, and publics, 1947–2007. Duke University Press.

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Ogula, V. (2025). Necropolitics and necropolice: Death, immortality, and art-activism in Russia. International Political Sociology, 19(2), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olaf006

Santos, A. B. dos. (2015). Colonização, quilombos: modos e significados. Instituto INCTI/UnB.

Santos, A. B. dos. (2023). A terra dá, a terra quer. Ubu Editora.

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