Blog | Visualisierung

On the 22nd of November, 2022, Claudia Mock from the Methods-Lab of the CRC 1265 organized the hybrid lecture and workshop “Visualizing Narrative Spaces” with the visual artist Simone Rueß, who shared insights into her work, which deals with the inscription of politics into urban structures, home-making practices and memory processes within biographical narrations, contextualized through drawings, animations, objects and installations. In this blog post, Simone Rueß reflects on the hybrid workshop, which was conceived as a performative narrative in which diverse participants from various disciplines developed individual visual approaches in a collective action.

This blogpost uses the phenomenon of the fata morgana – mirage – to illustrate the dynamics of real estate advertisements for exclusive housing developments in Cairo. In doing so, we investigate some of the ways in which public media and advertising create a display of the urban that does not reflect the lived social, spatial, and economic reality of the majority of the population. At the same time, this urban visual is produced and shaped by the intersectional dynamics of embedded societal norms.

The CRC 1265 is currently experimenting with visual methods of analysis. This blogpost presents one such experiment. In this experiment, preliminary research findings were transformed into graphics by a designer, thus setting in motion an image-based process of discovery and reflection. It is shown how such a short-term collaboration between social science and artistic design has been carried out and what kind of potential it brought with it.