As a response to multiple, overlapping crises—migration, economic precarity, racialized dispossession, and psychic strain—this panel brings together scholars and artists working across Latin American and diasporic contexts, including Afro-indigenous, migrant, and queer perspectives, whose practices turn to transmedial approaches not simply as formal experimentation but as a material necessity.

The combination of writing and photography responds, for the panelists, to the insufficiency of each medium on its own: an attempt to engage material, political, and affective matters that exceed any single mode of inscription. In this sense, transmedial practice becomes a way of working through precarity rather than representing it. Here, “matters” names both the conditions under which these practices take shape—devices, archives, projection, circulation—and the stakes that traverse them, producing and problematizing what might be called precarious inscriptions.

The session situates itself in dialogue with a growing body of work that moves beyond medium-specific analysis in literary and visual studies. While earlier scholarship has tended to focus on representation and indexicality, the projects presented here foreground mediation under pressure: the “poor image,” autotheoretical writing, and feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to subject formation. The panel contributes to these conversations by insisting on transmediality as a situated practice, shaped by conditions such as migration, labor, and the structuring force of anxiety, rather than as a purely formal category.

Beginning with Noraedén Mora Méndez, the panel approaches the question of material precarity through the examination of the collaborative work of Venezuelan artist Guariota, whose handmade “povera cameras” produce “poor images” shaped by migration and marginality. In dialogue with writing, these images form a fragile archive that resists dominant visual economies while raising questions about how to document precarity without reproducing exploitative forms of visibility. From this engagement with precarious archives, the panel turns to Elena Cardona’s ongoing transmedial project, structured as an abecedarian constellation in which photography, writing, and sound circulate across fragments. Here, the breakdown of language in moments of intimacy, grief, and displacement repositions photography as a practice of listening, reorganizing how thought takes shape when words fail.

The session then moves to Rodrigo Valenzuela’s photographic and installation-based practice, which addresses labor, undocumented experience, and the afterlives of imperial intervention in the Americas. By combining text and image, his work blurs documentary and fiction, exposing the tension between lived experience and its representation, particularly in relation to the erosion of working-class narratives. Finally, Inger Flem Soto’s paper brings these concerns into a psychoanalytic and feminist register, examining how anxiety and desire are displaced onto maternal figures through photographic projection. Here, projection operates as both a psychic and visual process, through which the maternal emerges as an unstable surface structured by absence and excess.

The session will consist of four presentations of 12 minutes each, leaving the remaining time for open discussion. The participants combine backgrounds in literary and theoretical work with formal training in photography and visual practice, ensuring distinct yet complementary approaches to the panel’s central questions. This intersection of disciplines is integral to the session, reflecting how transmedial practices emerge across different fields and conditions of production.