La revista digital y en acceso abierto Re-Visiones es una publicación académica, (bilingüe 2010-2020) de periodicidad anual en la que se agrupan ensayos inéditos en castellano en torno a trabajos relacionados con la teoría visual, la historia del arte, la investigación artística y los estudios culturales y visuales. Ha dependido de proyectos I+D y actualmente, en su segunda época, está adscrita al grupo de excelencia de investigación UCM “Investigación, arte universidad. Documentos para un debate”.
Reinventar la imagen arquitectónica con inteligencia artificial generativa: la exposición de ubicación específica «Arquitectura viva: Gehry» en el Museo Guggenheim Bilbao
The City and the Critique of Labour in Interwar Cinema: The Surrealist Background of René Clair’s Early Films
This article examines René Clair's contribution to interwar cinema and early Surrealism through a study of his film productions from the 1920s and 1930s. For this purpose, we examine some of his emblematic films as well as other lesser-known works, through various essential categories of Surrealism, drawing on both Walter Benjamin's interpretation of the movement and testimonies from some of its members. We delve deeper into the image of the modern city as portrayed by the avant-garde, seeking similarities and points of divergence between Clair’s films and other European cinematographic and photographic contemporary movements. Ultimately, the aim is to determine the politics of time, space, desire and work defined by Clair, and to explore the key strategies he employed when filming the urban phenomenon.
Re-Existences amid the Ruins of the Fossil City: Specters of Agri-Food Landscapes and Struggles over World-Making Meanings in the Global South
The essay explores the place occupied in the collective imagination by the weeds that grow in the urban environment of Mexico City. Faced with the crisis of sensory perception caused by industrial modernity, proposes reorienting our gaze toward the biocultural networks of vegetation as a central arena of struggle. On the basis of an approach to epistemologies of the south, it examines the unseen vegetation that proliferates on sidewalks and urban wastelands, which is proposed as an index of the epistemic racism that regulates our relationships with the territory, food traditions, and ways of knowing. Its contribution consists of recognizing these invisible materialities and suggesting how, by confronting them through a policy of attention, is possible to open up biocultural frameworks that go beyond food autonomy and contribute to reconfiguring the sensible.
¿Cómo saber si el cielo está nublado? Sobre Las horas (2025), una exposición de Ricardo Cotanda
Unsustainable Views: Aesthetics of a Pixelated Landscape
This article examines the role of image technologies in the conception of, and interaction with, the environment we inhabit, taking as case studies relevant manifestations of these technologies. Starting from the notion of landscape—historically described and situated as a cultural construction—an analysis is carried out to identify how the specific conditions of the observer, as well as the representational devices and techniques that mediate the experience of the environment, significantly affect its conceptualization. Based on this premise, the text examines the consequences of these successive forms of distancing. It highlights the risks associated with the overexploitation of ecosystem services and the accelerated transformation of climatic conditions. It also underlines the paradox underlying the unsustainability of the very infrastructures that generate these distortions in perception, and their capacity to alter the material conditions that make their own construction and preservation possible.
The Gestures of Hands in Drawing Books - a warburgian reading using the Historical Archive of the University of Porto
The paper deals with the archival material from the Rectory of the Universidade do Porto, specifically with engravings published in Drawing Books from several figures of History of Art, namely: the Carracci family’s educational prints and Francesco Bartolozzi engravings, both from the 18th century as well as Robert Sayer’s edition from 1762(?)). The proposal aims to reflect through our empirical contact with these archival materials, mainly focusing images instructing how to draw hands. Such images are engravings and were used in the early beginnings in the practice of teaching drawing in Porto, Aula de Desenho from the Academia Real de Marinha e Comércio da Cidade do Porto. Following Aby Warburg’s thesis of Pathosformel, our reflection attempts to show how the representations of hand gestures “survived” in the pedagogy of drawing. More importantly, we will underline how the drawn hand gestures and poses are an emotional product of phenomenological forces of human experience. The arguments and reflections are grounded on Georges Didi-Huberman’s analysis and his work around Aby Warburg’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings. (Didi-Huberman 2011, 2000, 2010). We will articulate texts from art history, theory of image, anthropology and neuroscience literature, with our own visual essays to enlighten our phenomenological experience when working around the archival material from the University of Porto.
Landscapes of Water and Concrete: Images, Infrastructures and Ghosts of the Francoist Hydraulic Paradigm
The urbanization of nature driven by Francoist development policies was based on a productivist and extractivist vision of natural resources, particularly water. A paradigmatic outcome of these policies was the construction of large dams, primarily designed to supply hydroelectric power to industrial hubs. Beyond their material function, these infrastructures were imbued with strong symbolic value, standing as icons of modernity and national wealth. Their visual representation played a key role in consolidating an aesthetic of progress that legitimized territorial intervention as a technical and civilizing feat. Through a historical and critical analysis of some of the images that shaped this imaginary, this text aims to challenge the hegemonic discourses of hydraulic capitalism, exposing its material consequences and the dynamics of dispossession that underpinned it.
Fever for Heights: Petro-masculinity and the Fascist Sublime in Vox
The fascist mountain genre is exuberantly reappearing in the contemporary propaganda of the Spanish far-right party Vox. This article presents the symptom as the continuation of its manifestation during the 20th century, as heir to the bergfilm and the Francoist mountain genre, but also as one whose genealogy begins with the modern armored Rückenfigur. The liberal and the fascist subject, although they consider each other ultimate nemeses, evince in their images an identical way of representing their petro-masculinity: in them, we persistently see an individual who repeatedly looks dominantly into the abyss of the experience of the sublime and who reads the affectation that overwhelms him on the cliff under the rain of the eroticization of violence. At the same time, and contradictorily, they both despise the role that the body plays in the event. An altitude sickness with which we are all afflicted
Fossil Affects: A Dialogue Between Petromasculinities and Affect Theory
The concept of petromasculinities allows us to understand how climate denialism is articulated with the anti-feminist reaction and other authoritarian positions. This approach investigates how masculine identities are constructed in contexts of social uncertainty through hatred and fossil desire. However, there are a series of questions that the petromasculinities approach must address in order to broaden and deepen its analysis. This article presents some of these questions and attempts to answer them from the theory of affects, which is revealed as a complementary and enriching approach to decentralize the subject, introduce a material and institutional view of petromasculinities and refine political proposals.
This paper approaches the only experience of the Instituto Nacional de Colonización in Galicia, in A Terra Chá, from the perspective of infrastructural design. Its singular disperse condition, where the dwellings do not respond to an urban form but only to logistic principles, allows us to apprehend the political, technical and project aspirations of creating a new landscape for a new man and the consequences that, more than fifty years after its completion, this spatial matrix of active forms, technical and discursive objects has produced. On this basis, the synthetic condition of a modern territory urbanised under the premise of maximising resources will be analysed from three complementary points of view: its mediatic construction, its environmental construction and the construction of a new man destined to inhabit it.
The Fossil Disappearance of Fireflies: Energy Modernity, Cultural Genocide and Industrial Harmfulness Between Neocapitalist Italy and the Ecosocial Emergency
The article analyzes the relationship between the imaginaries of fossil modernity and the cultural transformations taking place in neocapitalist Italy, with the aim of proposing a broader reflection that speaks to the current context of ecosocial emergency. To this end, it draws on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Scritti corsari (1973–1975) and his posthumous novel Petrolio (1993), in which the Italian poet, filmmaker and intellectual investigated the history of ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi). Once conceived as a project of national and anti-colonial capitalism with a human face under the leadership of entrepreneur Enrico Mattei, this state-owned company had by then become a prototype of neoliberal globalization under Eugenio Cefis. The article addresses the role that fossil ideology played in the audiovisual imaginaries produced by ENI, particularly through the analysis of two specific films: I prigionieri del sottosuolo (1956), by Ubaldo Magnaghi, and L’Italia non è un paese povero (1960), by Joris Ivens. “Finally, the last part of the article describes how the socio-energetic narrative promoted by ENI’s documentaries, but also Pasolini’s critique of hyper-consumption, were challenged by the mobilizations of the new generations of activists that emerged in Italy during the 1960s and 1970s, organized around operaismo, feminism, and an industrial ecology based on the concept of ‘nocività’ (harmfulness).”
Predatory Infrastructures: Mining Extractivism and Indigenous Resistances in the Work of Ignacio Acosta
This article examines how Ignacio Acosta’s work interrogates the extractive dynamics of global capitalism and articulates visual narratives in dialogue with the resistances of local and Indigenous communities. It analyses projects focused on copper extraction in Chile and iron mining in Sweden, adopting a qualitative approach grounded in the social sciences, and particularly in political ecology. The study argues that the artist’s practice exposes the material, financial, and biopolitical dimensions of these metallic elements; reveals how extractive infrastructures deplete resources, destroy biodiversity, and dispossess communities; and makes visible the cultural and political strategies of resistance to mining operations. The article concludes that the value of Acosta’s work lies in its capacity to rethink the links between mining, colonialism, and neoliberalism; to question the paradoxes of legal frameworks and green capitalism; and to imagine liveable futures emerging from the experiences of the territories most affected.
Nueva Babilonia ahora: utopías urbanas para un futuro post-fósil
Through the displacement of Constant Nieuwenhuys’s Situationist utopia New Babylon toward its contemporary rereading New New Babylon by Jonas Staal, this text examines the transition between the era of fossil expansion and the time of ecological collapse. Constant’s proposal, formulated in the context of the Great Acceleration, imagines a city for a new civilization liberated from labor. Despite the revolutionary scope of the project, New Babylon remains bound to the imperatives of fossil urbanism and the modern faith in technical progress. In contrast, Staal seeks to reactivate the Situationist utopian hypothesis by translating it into a context of ecosocial crisis. Based on this premise, the essay argues for the urgency of reclaiming radical political imagination as a force capable of reconfiguring the sensory, social, and energetic conditions from which to imagine and inhabit the world.
Estéticas energéticas: del cemento fósil a los prototipos de transición. Residuos urbanos, arquitecturas del futuro y paisajes compartidos
This article examines the relationship between aesthetics, energy, and modernity through a material genealogy of fossil modernity—coal, iron, oil, and cement—and their cultural, social, and environmental implications. It presents All Footprints the Footprint. Energy Aesthetics as an interdisciplinary case study that explores sustainable alternatives to Portland cement through the use of industrial and urban waste. Drawing from artistic practice and scientific research, the author proposes a framework where art, science, and civic participation converge to rethink construction materials, environmental justice, and the energy transition. Located in Madrid’s Cañada Real Galiana and Valdemingómez area, the project combines technical experimentation, social mediation, and aesthetic reflection to envision future architectures grounded in equity, sustainability, and shared sensibility.
La conspiración de la arquitectura: notas sobre la ansiedad moderna
We, the residents of modernity, live in an unquiet house. This essay examines the relationship between human subjects and their built environment, but it does so less by focusing on architecture than on what one might call “architecture once removed'. It is less concerned with the built environment itself than with a prevalent image of that environment in “high” and “popular” culture, in literature, in film and painting. It is my contention that a particular unsettling image of buildings has gained increasing currency in the modern epoch. I will attempt to show that such an image — and a concomitant anxiety — exists, and to offer an explanation for its provenance.
Coches, autopistas y piel. Entrevista múltiple a Sara Ahmed, Cara Daggett, Layla Martínez y Joanna Żylińska
This four-voiced interview seeks to articulate sensitive and theoretical perspectives on a terrain that has been scarcely explored from an ecosocial standpoint: the symbolic infrastructures of the Anthropocene in relation to masculinities, urbanization, and politics. The dialogue brings together Sara Ahmed, feminist writer and independent scholar, author of The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), Queer Phenomenology (2006), and Living a Feminist Life (2017); Cara Daggett, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech, author of The Birth of Energy (2019) and Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire (2018); Layla Martínez, editor and writer of Utopía no es una isla (2020) and Carcoma (2021); and Joanna Żylińska, writer and Professor of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, author of Nonhuman Photography (2017) and The End of Man (2018). In this multifaceted dialogue, they explore the latent petromasculinity embedded in contemporary infrastructures.
This article looks at the industrial infrastructure not as an invisible system of connectivity and mobility that keeps capitalism humming in the background but as a manufactured miasma of despair, toxicity, and death. Truscello terms this “infrastructural brutalism”–a formulation that not only alludes to the historical nexus of infrastructure and the concrete aesthetic of Brutalist architecture but also describes the ecological, political, and psychological brutality of industrial infrastructures.
City Body, Angelika Loderer’s solo exhibition at SOPHIE TAPPEINER, explores the hidden infrastructures of urban life—waste, maintenance, and communication—through sculptural works that transform discarded materials into sites of metamorphosis. Engaging with theories of urban metabolism and care, Loderer reveals how matter persists beyond consumption, exposing the fractures in capitalist systems that fail to reabsorb their own waste. From corroded debris to fungal networks overtaking obsolete objects, her works suggest alternative cycles of repair and transformation. City Body invites viewers to reconsider the city as a living, digesting entity—where nothing truly disappears, but continually reshapes what remains.
Architecture And the Death of Carbon Modernity
This essay reexamines the relationship between architecture, energy, and the climate crisis through the concept of the carbon form, understood as the spatial paradigm associated with a society organized around fossil fuel use. It argues that architectural discourse has reduced environmental concerns to matters of energy efficiency, overlooking the ways in which abundant energy has shaped carbon-intensive typologies, infrastructures, and modes of life. Tracing a genealogy that extends from modernism to digital design, the essay shows how the carbon form endures as both a material and cultural foundation of the built environment, reproducing carbon modernity despite the increasingly urgent pressures of the climate crisis. Within a context defined by metabolic rift, the Anthropocene, and the continued dominance of the carbon regime, the essay proposes transcending—rather than erasing—the carbon form through new spatial organizations that anticipate emerging energy and social transitions. Decarbonization thus becomes a central formal, cultural, and political project for architecture.
In Hometown to Come (2025), Mire Lee transforms the stage into a visceral ruin of Seoul—an urban corpse composed of torn tarpaulins, copper wires, and displaced organs of failed buildings. Commissioned by MMCA Performing Arts 2024: Space Elevator, the work marks the artist’s return to her hometown, reframing it as a site of exhaustion and cyclical decay. Through collaboration with performer Sunhee Bae, Lee stages waste not as residue but as a living infrastructure, animated by acts of cleaning, rearranging, and delirious monologue. The performance suspends linear progress, foregrounding the intimacy between human and waste—bodies that modernity renders replaceable. Refusing repair or redemption, Hometown to Come dwells in contamination, exposing Seoul’s compulsive redevelopment as both ritual and illness. In this homecoming, waste performs back, reminding us that to inhabit the city today is to live perpetually amid what has been discarded.
This graphic essay reflects on the concepts developed for Common Accounts’ installation Have a Nice Day, a solar canopy and artificial sun presented at MUDAC’s Solar Biennale in 2025. The essay intersperses images of the installation with transcripts of narration sourced from influencer testimonials and Georges Bataille’s “The Accursed Share,” staging a critical encounter between contemporary domestic therapeutic devices and Bataille’s theory of excess solar energy. Through this juxtaposition, “A Case for Sunbathing” examines how artificial sunlight has been theorized in popular consumer advertising and wellness-oriented social media for applications as diverse as cellular rehabilitation, anti-aging, and enhanced fertility. Taking Have a Nice Day as a conceptual scaffold, the paper follows how the installation troubles psycho-social associations with the sun in an age of climate anxiety, channeling them into sensible, energetic encounters in the gallery and tracing their entanglement with optimization, self-design, planetarity, technology, and daily life.
The shop window as a political loudspeaker. Between the commodification of the gaze and resistance
Due to its highly mediatic character and its centrality in the urban space, the intervened shop window functions as a device complicit in the economy of attention, halfway between an instrument of ideological expression and a form of cultural and social resistance. By examining cases such as the suffragette protests, the Kristallnacht, the propaganda strategies of authoritarian regimes and the actions of environmental movements, the numerous episodes of shop window attacks or manipulations can be analyzed around two distinct behaviors in relation to this device: one, of concealment; the other, of exhibition. This study aims to determine whether these actions subvert the shop window’s mercantile function or ultimately reinforce it. Although seemingly opposite, they represent two sides of the same coin.
What Is Done at the Same Time: Threading Images of Women’s Work
Reseña de Ritmos. Imágenes del trabajo femenino, exposición que tuvo lugar en el Espacio D del Museo Reina Sofía entre el 21 de marzo y el 13 de junio de 2025. Comisariada por Selina Blasco, Maite Garbayo y María Rosón. La exposición reunía imágenes del archivo de la Biblioteca y el Centro de Documentación publicadas en la prensa gráfica y otros objetos librescos desde los años veinte hasta la posguerra.
For a long time, lesbians were practically invisible in cities on the Iberian Peninsula. They barely had places or spaces of their own, and were seldom associated with images or imageries. In the Spanish State, “franquismo” contributed greatly to this invisibility. But the occupation of urban space by an identity is essential for it to be constructed as a political and social subject. After the Transition, with the first groups of lesbian feminist activists, and during the 1980s and 1990s, lesbians began a process of transforming their condition of invisibility, accompanied by a drive for self-representation, within the streets of cities such as Bilbao, Barcelona and Madrid. These photos are mainly in the possession of the photographers and those who appear in them, inside boxes or stored away in the closet. In this article, we begin to shed light on them, analysing and reflecting on their effects today, opening up new urban counter-imageries in the context of the Peninsula
Becoming-with. Multispecies recovery epidemic
This article deals with affirmative politics that revolve around new ways of doing-with, of becoming-with, in the form of sympoiesis between sentient creatures that inhabit the margins of a wounded world. Thus, an interspecies relationship is experienced with a colony of five rescued rats with whom a bond has been established, generating spaces of coexistence, collective, colony and encounter, paying attention to that which connects a diversity of alternative bodies bruised, sexualised, naturalised and devalued by the dominant hegemonic tradition. In this way, new forms of relationality and affectivity are composed that can be translated as urgent means of revolution, transformation and recuperation that make affects an artistic practice of resistance and restoration of refuges for dissident othernesses.
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven: sicalíptica-dada-queer
This article is an attempt to articulate the look at the historical avant-garde from a queer methodology, which challenges the perspectives of the classical historiographic narrative, in the words of José Esteban Muñoz is «looking at the past again for the first time». It seeks to break down rigid arguments, presenting the great lady of Dadaism, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, as a personality of the cultural scene of the early twentieth century. Closer to popular culture, to mass spectacles, to the European and American green wave, than to the usual discourses of artistic contexts and dynamite avant-garde groups, and rescuing a queer personality avant la lettre, a blurred, elusive personality, very difficult to define, who manages to assume that implausible balance of the sicalipsis.
Aerial root rights in aesthetic heterotopias
This text addresses processes of collaborative imagination in autonomous normative systems, which, through aesthetic practices, have created aerial root rights to imagine and organize heterotopic spaces of life. I present the case of the performance practices carried out in the Zapotec community of Santiago Xanica, in Oaxaca. This practices fostered a reconfiguration of the sensible and activated a political imagination that made local historical problems visible and reorganized the intersubjective relationships that led the participants of the Sembrando Teatro group to peacefully take over Finca Alemania to create an autonomous educational center.
The objective of this research is to present a set of experimental writing exercises based on the thought of Gilles Deleuze. These exercises are part of a "book in progress" entitled Delirating Deleuze, which addresses the critique of hegemonic models of writing and the search for alternatives to multimodal, performative, and transdisciplinary writing. The book is provisionally divided into three sections. "Delirating the Place" of Writing explores the meaning of a text through its position in the blank space of the page (minor text, overtext, inverted text). "Delirating the Form" of Writing addresses the significative power of the graphic form of the word (text-connectivity, text-cartography). "Delirating the Matter" of Writing investigates experimental practices of material mutation of texts (text-mutation).
In 1975, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari released Kafka, toward a Minor Literature, a book in which they defined the revolutionary conditions of the literature written by a minority within the language of the majority in power. In 2024, we retype their words into a .doc file and we rewrite them in “suggesting” mode, replacing the concept of “Minor Literature” with the one of “Artistic research”. By doing so, we propose an academic writing exercise based on the displacement and replacement of words; a gesture based on appropriation that breaks up and interacts with the text. The writing signs coexist between these words, as well as the trace of each hand that produced it. The result is an interpretative transcription that suggests an analogy between the Minor Literature proposed by Deleuze and Guattari and Artistic Research at art schools.