Call for Papers:

Constellations of the Sensible: Aiesthesis, Encounters and Frictions in Visual Cultures
For the journal Vista
https://revistavista.pt/index.php/vista/announcement/view/106

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)

Deadline for submissions: December 5, 2025

We live in a time when the production and circulation of images intertwine 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 rather ways of acting and responding to regimes of power, constituting themselves as tools of existence, resistance, and epistemological reconfiguration.

This openness to new ways of producing and experiencing visualities has implied rethinking the role of the image and the gaze in the construction of meanings, as well as the relations of social and cultural power that appear 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). Proposals for the decentralization of the sensitive contribute to this, such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s (2010) concept of ch’ixi, which indicates sensitive logics that resist Western homogenization and highlight an aesthetics of difference without conciliatory synthesis, and Leda Martins’s (2021) reflections on spiral time, which centralize the body, memory, and ancestry as reconfigurators of aesthetic perception.

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

This new perspective on images and visualities (slow, attentive, and sensitive) invites us to reflect on how practices in the field of visual cultures—including visual arts, 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, as well as promoting micropolitical 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 and fostering dialogues between aesthetics, politics, and social practice, we propose exploring the importance of being open to new ways of producing and experiencing visualities. Using Walter Mignolo’s (2010, 2019) concept of aiesthesis as a guiding principle, we invite submissions that explore aesthetic, cultural, political, and/or epistemological dimensions in visual manifestations. We aim to gather contributions that investigate ways of apprehending and creating images that challenge paradigms, expand ways of seeing (Berger et al., 1972), and reconfigure the visible-sensible space. The practical dimension of this reflection may be manifest, for example, in projects, performances, exhibitions, activism and digital networks that strain the relationship between visibility, power and ethics, promoting encounters and frictions 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 utilize 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 addressing the following topics:

• Theoretical and practical explorations of the concept of aiesthesis;
• Decolonial visual practices, counter-archives and memory restitution;
• Contemporary visual arts as modes of producing 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 of marginalized groups (Latin American, indigenous, Afro-descendant, among others);
• Different modes of production of sensitivity;
• Relations 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 resignification of images and monuments;
• Sensitive reinterpretations of tangible and intangible heritage.

IMPORTANT DATES

Proposal submission period (full texts): from September 23 to December 5, 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 that adheres to rigorous peer-review standards and operates under a double-blind peer review process. Each submitted paper will be sent to two reviewers who have been previously invited to evaluate it based on its academic quality, originality, and relevance to the journal’s objectives and scope.

Originals should be submitted through the journal’s website (https://www.revistavista.pt). If you are accessing Vista for the first time, you must register to submit your article (see instructions for registration here).

The guide for authors can be found here.

For more information, contact: vista@ics.uminho.pt

REFERENCES

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books.

Berger, J., Blomberg, S., Fox, C., Dibb, M., & Hollis, R. (1972). Ways of seeing. PenguinBooks.

Cusicanqui, S. (2010). Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: A reflection on decolonizing practices and discourses. Lemon paint.

Martins, LM (2021). Performances of spiral time, poetics of the body-screen. Cobogó Publishing House.

Mignolo, W. (2010). Decolonial Aiesthesis. Calle14, 4 (4), 10–15.

Mignolo, W. (2019). Epistemic/aesthetic reconstitution: La decolonial aesthesis a decade later. Calle14, 14 (25), 14–32.

Rancière, J. (2000). Le partage du sensible. La Fabrique Éditions.

Rolnik, S. (2018). Spheres of Insurrection. N-1 Editions.