From No Man’s Land to Latent Space: Far-Right Parties’ Social Media Depictions of Migration - Jacopo Galimberti
21. Jan
Leuphana University Lüneburg I C40.530
Wed. 21.01.2026. 6 pm
For nearly two years, social media accounts associated with the AfD and with the Lega (an Italian far-right party) have circulated AI-generated images of migrants. What, in this context, is the epistemological status of such visuals? What do they disclose about the construction of the migrant figure? Drawing on an analytical framework informed by political iconology and social history, this paper examines a selection of these images, with the aim of elucidating their visual logics as well as their political functions.
Jacopo Galimberti is Associate Professor at IUAV, the University of Venice, and Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg with a three-year project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He has published extensively on the connections between art and politics in the twentieth century and beyond. He is the author of Images of Class. Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso 2022); Individuals against Individualism. Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956-1969) (Liverpool University Press, 2017), Détournement und Kitsch. Die Postkarten von HP Zimmer (Les Presse de Nanterre, 2020), co-editor of Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Manchester University Press, 2019) and of Art for the Many: Pablo Echaurren (Silvana, 2025). Together with Steve Wright, he is the co-author of the forthcoming book The Year of Living Dangerously: Italy’s 1977 Movement, to be published by Verso in 2026.
Organisation: Stephan Scheel
Language: English