Wayward struggles, critical tech practices, design fabulations
“This booklet is made during the ASCA workshop Wayward Visuality: The Question of Violence and Liberation in 2026. It is the result of a workshop Bringing critical fabulation to life.
During the workshop we explored how designing and designs are intertwined with violence and oppression and how this can be challenged and subverted through counter-investigations and creative resistance.
Inspiration was taken from the book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. All workshop participants wrote short texts as a response to pictures that were prepared specifically for this workshop. The texts (in bold) and the pictures (including references) are combined in this publication.
We hope it invites further conversations on haunted data and critical tech practices. Join our search for collective rebelliousness and wayward experimentation against automated border regimes, violent technologies, and restrictive data designs.”
About the ASCA event: “In this three day workshop we aim to bring together a wide variety of activists, artists and scholars to interrogate how the wayward responds to violence but also, to think about visual culture as wayward in its work to refuse systems of oppression. Where the wayward is understood as that which threatens structures of oppression and power, through one’s deviance from oppressive systems and making a commitment to living an emancipated futurity now.
Invoking the ‘wayward’ as the central concept within this workshop provides an opening to think beyond binaries within violence, to move beyond the constraints in which violence holds individuals and communities to. Franz Fanon famously wrote “violence can thus be understood to be the perfect mediation. The colonised man liberates himself in and through violence” (44). The wayward, in their rebellion, is often considered to be violent in their “smashing out” and it is, this waywardness we seek to explore, interrogate and most importantly, learn from.
We seek to create a workshop that is less a conference and more a site of collective experimentation, understood as hands-on, collaborative practices where participants not only discuss violence in abstract terms but also engage materially through image (re)appropriation, testing how visual interventions can subvert, disrupt, and reframe dominant narratives. Whilst positivist histories might lay claim to a closed story, we see stories of violence as unfinished. Where the wayward plays a critical role in rupturing, disfiguring and calling into question that deemed sacrosanct.”
