FOREWORD
Contrary to the growing trend that insists on denouncing the complicity of images with cultural production modes and the poeticizing power of capital, we are interested in exploring the critical space that images can configure and in pushing the ambivalence of their power to its limits. While images have been effective devices for fixing certain ways of seeing, an important part of their work also consists in creating new relationships, enriching the movement of forms, and articulating other modes of desire. Images from the cultural industry allow us to see very little, they saturate both public and imaginal spaces, organizing our everyday relationships and the rhythm in which they take place. Hence the key question is: how can we generate dislocations that drive differentiating movements? How can we activate their critical potential? Imagination, through fantasy, enables metamorphic variations that expand its possibilities. The notion of the image here is not considered solely as a fully-formed state—as in a portrait—but as something that comes into being in appearance, producing its own formative conditions.
In this sense, Concreta 25 proposes itself as a space for reflection on images in their capacity to form relationships that can alter our regimes of visibility. We are interested in exploring our imaginative forces, our poetic and political potential for resistance to create other conditions of possibility within a reality that increasingly feels suffocating. Marie-José Mondzain argues that images, even while being “no big deal,” can introduce a seismic event. Of course, they can distract, align, and inform, but they can also produce a differential perception; organize and open a field for contesting the sensible, developing another phantasmagoria, and creating fictions and forms of desire that generate new ways of community aggregation.
This issue opens with a text by Mondzain, in which she develops her understanding of images as a zone—a space for that which has no space—a reflection on the emergence of form from the amorphous. Emmanuel Alloa proposes inverting the terms of what is considered a lack in images when they are defined by their lack of being—as copies or entities in a diminished state of reality—by proposing the being of images as a minor being, on the verge of non-being, thus affirming their intermediate nature. Catherine Malabou develops the theoretical conflict between Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Rancière regarding the political role of art—between disagreement and difference—to argue that there is a radical alterity in equality. Subjects, in order to be equal, do not cease to be unequal in their equality: the anarchic dimension of equality, which is also where its ungovernability lies. Rancière, for his part, questions the notion of resistance as an inherent virtue of art, introducing a reflection on how the work of sensible difference instituted by art operates.
Next, Alex Reynolds shares a set of images operating through superimposition and loss of center, created by the projectionists at the cinematheque he frequents. Lúcia Prancha offers a reflection on the deceleration of images, where slowing down does not refer to a slower image but to the creation of another rhythm and durational structures. Duen Neka’hen Sacchi unfolds Una sola escena: drawing from the matter of dreams, she reconfigures a memory without images, forming another relationship with the affective ties of the past. In a conversation with Laura Citarella, we reflect on the power of fictions, their generative dimension, and the urgent need to animate new fables that disempower dominant fictions and open the possibility of other languages. Thanks to a collaboration with the publisher Caja Negra, we include a translation of a chapter from Hito Steyerl’s newly published book Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (Verso, 2025), dedicated to thinking about the digital gap between poor images and images of power. Marie Bardet analyzes the haptic dimension of images, asking whether there are gestures they establish to continue delving into the necessary loss of frontality. The dialogue with Ana García Varas addresses the materiality of images, as well as their agency, the concrete practices they enable, and the new forms of contact they facilitate. Lucía C. Pino contributes with seven images randomly inserted in the issues, slipping in forms that question univocity. Lucía Egaña Rojas challenges us on how our visibility regimes are institutionally constructed and preserved, as well as on the patrimonial force of our imagination: she proposes disabling the enabled condition that has been granted to certain images in order to normalize narratives and positions. Rosângela Rennó, through images, analyzes the link between gravestones and living things, unsettling narratives that erase the ties between Western Europe’s wealth and the processes of colonization in the Americas. Finally, the issue concludes with the contribution from the open call, in which Jefferson García analyzes the artistic potential of video games.
From diverse approaches, this issue seeks to imagine other places for images and for the power of sensitive work—not as a demand implying a lack of empirical awareness, but as a collective invitation that resonates with the affects of matter in other ways, in order to create modes of existence where life, in all its rich multiplicity, remains possible.
