[Commlist] Vista Call for papers : Constellations of the Sensible: Aiesthesis, Encounters and Frictions in Visual Cultures

The call for papers for the journal Vista (17) on “Constellations of the 
Sensible: Aiesthesis, Encounters and Frictions in Visual Cultures” (No. 
17) will be open between 23 September and 5 December, 2025.

Thematic Editors: Patricia Posch (University of Minho, Portugal/State 
University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Alessandra Simões Paiva (Federal 
University of Southern Bahia, Brazil/Brazilian Association of Art 
Critics, Brazil) and Rosa Cabecinhas (University of Minho, Portugal)

We live in a time when the production and circulation of images are 
intertwined with multiple forms of perception, sensory experience, and 
social relations. Based on Walter Mignolo's concept of aiesthesis, we 
understand that sensitivity is not limited to visual experience, but is 
inscribed in specific historical, cultural, and political contexts, 
involving the body, memory, affections, and community practices. 
Looking, feeling, and perceiving are not neutral activities, but ways of 
acting and responding to regimes of power, constituting tools of 
existence, resistance, and epistemological reconfiguration.

This openness to new ways of producing and feeling visualities has 
implied rethinking the role of image and gaze in the construction of 
meanings, as well as social and cultural power relations that figure as 
a backdrop, based on a proposal for insurgent aesthetics that values 
linguistic, spiritual, and bodily hybridity as a form of sensitive 
resistance (Anzaldúa, 1987).  Contributing to this are proposals for the 
decentralisation of the sensible, such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui's 
concept of ch'ixi (2010), which points to sensible logics that resist 
Western homogenisation and highlight an aesthetic of difference without 
conciliatory synthesis, and Leda Martins' (2021) reflections on spiral 
time, which focus on the body, memory, and ancestry as reconfigurers of 
aesthetic perception.

Fundamentally, investigating and producing visualities in contemporary 
times requires not only attention to what is seen, but also to how one 
feels, participates, and co-creates the world collectively. Jacques 
Rancière (2000), in Le Partage du Sensible (The Sharing of the 
Sensible), reminds us of the need to take a careful look at the 
distribution schemes of the visible and the aesthetic experience, both 
intrinsically political and determinative of who has a voice and who can 
participate in the public sphere. This sensitivity incorporates a poetic 
and ethical dimension, recognising that perceiving and creating images 
simultaneously involves affective, ethical and aesthetic experiences.

This new way of looking at images and visualities (slow, attentive and 
sensitive) invites us to reflect on how practices in the field of visual 
cultures — including visual arts, the media and curatorial 
practices—reconfigure ecologies of feeling  and can act as instruments 
of existence, resistance, insurgency and/or epistemological 
reconfiguration, challenging established social norms, promoting 
micro-political insurgencies (Rolnik, 2018) and expanding the 
understanding of what is experiential and visually shareable as sensitive.

This issue of Vista is dedicated to these diverse manifestations. With 
the aim of mapping and encouraging research that expands the boundaries 
of visual culture, incorporating sensitive experiences that go beyond 
the gaze, promoting dialogues between aesthetics, politics and social 
practice, we propose to explore the importance of being open to new ways 
of producing and feeling visualities. Taking as our guiding thread the 
concept of aiesthesis proposed by Walter Mignolo (2010, 2019), we invite 
contributions that explore aesthetic, cultural, political and/or 
epistemological dimensions in visual manifestations. We aim to bring 
together contributions that investigate ways of apprehending and 
creating images that challenge paradigms, broaden ways of seeing (Berger 
et al., 1972) and reconfigure the visible-sensitive space.

The practical dimension of this reflection may be manifested, for 
example, in projects, performances, exhibitions, activism, and digital 
networks that strain the relationship between visibility, power, and 
ethics, promoting encounters and friction between different 
epistemologies and ways of seeing and creating visualities.

We encourage submissions in the form of articles, visual essays, case 
studies, interviews, or book reviews that use or critically examine 
contemporary visual arts practices that propose new poetics and visual 
ecologies. Submissions from various fields of knowledge are welcome, 
including (but not limited to) works that address the following topics:

Theoretical and practical explorations of the concept of aiesthesis;

  * Decolonial visual practices, counter-archives and restitution of
    memories;
  * Contemporary visual arts as modes of production of sensitivity and
    resistance;
  * Aesthetics of activism and visual, digital or media-mediated
    performance;
  * Politics of visibility, insurgent images and modes of visual 
resistance;
  * Visual production by marginalised groups (Latin American,
    indigenous, Afro-descendant, among others);
  * Different modes of producing sensitivity;
  * Relationships between image, sensitivity and alternative 
epistemologies;
  * Textual and visual hybridisms, poetics of encounter and friction;
  * Visual education, community curation and participatory practices;
  * Contemporary technologies and their aesthetic, ethical, and
    political implications in image production;
  * Co-creation and processes of re-signification of images and monuments;
  * Sensitive reinterpretations of tangible and intangible heritage.


IMPORTANT DATES

Proposal submission period (full texts): 23 September to 5 December 2025

Publication period: continuous edition (January to June 2026)

LANGUAGE

Articles may be submitted in English or Portuguese. Articles selected 
for publication will be translated into Portuguese or English, 
respectively, and published in full in both languages. EDITING AND 
SUBMISSION

Vista is an open access academic journal, operating according to 
demanding peer review standards, using a double-blind review process. 
Each submitted work will be sent to two reviewers who have been 
previously invited to evaluate it, according to its academic quality, 
originality and relevance to the journal's objectives and scope.

Manuscripts should be submitted via the journal's website 
(https://www.revistavista.pt <https://www.revistavista.pt>). If you are 
accessing Vista for the first time, you must register in order to submit 
your article (instructions for registering can be found here 
<https://revistavista.pt/index.php/vista/user/register>).

The author guidelines can be found here 
<https://revistavista.pt/index.php/vista/about/submissions>.

For further information, please contact: (vista /at/ ics.uminho.pt) 
<mailto:(vista /at/ ics.uminho.pt)>

No payment from the authors will be required


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