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Rosa Luxemburg, a writer and an activist, believed in collective action. Her sensibilities, informed by ethical feminism and care economy, and her call for social transformation and democratic renewal are significant for contemporary activist interventions. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that there is ‘an alternative visual vocabulary emerging’. Similarly, Grace Lee Boggs discusses ‘visionary organizing’, which defines imagining change and creating changes of vision. Lieven De Cauter proposes to consider ‘subversivity’, ‘a disruptive attitude that tries to create openings, possibilities in the ‘closedness’ of a system’. Urgent local and global events and crises motivate collective actions which engage images and bodies in novel and unexpected ways beyond representation. Global activist and interventionist manifestations on- and off-line, and actions of collaborative activist groups raise questions around the use of strategies of embodiment enabling collective action, further expanding the ethos of consciousness-raising employed by 1970s activism. They demonstrate new modes of seeing and a novel approach toward visual activism, its methods and strategies of organization and dissemination.

This session, through art historical and practice-led considerations, seeks to explore the phenomenon of transnational visual activism through a feminist lens. What new forms of participation and belonging within space emerge that account for the interplay of feminized narratives and defeminization of spatial metaphors while considering ecologies of care? What are the new modalities of visual activism? How can we combat the oversaturation of the image to find new visual paradigms within the field of visual activism? What strategies of embodiment are employed for collective action?