MANIFESTO
We live inside an unprecedented flood of images: generative visuals, synthetic faces, 3D renderings, video leaks, livestreams, surveillance footage, memes.
Images circulate than our capacity to look at them, let alone understand them.
At the same time, we are exposed daily to images of extreme violence, domination, and power, consumed individually yet experienced .
We live inside an unprecedented flood of images: generative visuals, synthetic faces, 3D renderings, video leaks, livestreams, surveillance footage, memes.
Images circulate than our capacity to look at them, let alone understand them.
At the same time, we are exposed daily to images of extreme violence, domination, and power, consumed individually yet experienced .
Every image exists in relation to others: images that precede it, images it answers to, images it contradicts or erases.
In the age of predictive and speculative media, images not only represent the future, they actively participate in producing it.
Renderings of cities, territories, and infrastructures, for example, are used to guide genocidal, political and economic decisions, often by actors distant from the places depicted, reshaping social, environmental, and cultural realities they even exist.
We seek to these relations together, tracing the ethical, political, economic and emotional circuits that connect one image to another, and collectively producing meaning rather than receiving it passively.
Rather than asking whether an image is true or false, we ask:
What does it do? What does it connect to? What does it demand from us?
The School of the Image is a transmedia project that proposes to the act of seeing, restoring time, attention to our relationship with images through a series of lecture-performances, workshops and conferences.
Rather than treating images as objects to be consumed or verified, the project invites participants to read, dissect, and reconstruct images together, developing a shared for and predictive media, where meaning emerges collectively rather than passively received.
In the age of predictive and speculative media, images not only represent the future, they actively participate in producing it.
Renderings of cities, territories, and infrastructures, for example, are used to guide genocidal, political and economic decisions, often by actors distant from the places depicted, reshaping social, environmental, and cultural realities they even exist.
We seek to these relations together, tracing the ethical, political, economic and emotional circuits that connect one image to another, and collectively producing meaning rather than receiving it passively.
Rather than asking whether an image is true or false, we ask:
What does it do? What does it connect to? What does it demand from us?
The School of the Image is a transmedia project that proposes to the act of seeing, restoring time, attention to our relationship with images through a series of lecture-performances, workshops and conferences.
Rather than treating images as objects to be consumed or verified, the project invites participants to read, dissect, and reconstruct images together, developing a shared for and predictive media, where meaning emerges collectively rather than passively received.
Trump Gaza
Gaza Riviera
The Line
Ai-generated Al Aqsa compound
Tiran and Sanafir
The GREAT Trust Plan
FIFA and the Board of Peace
“The New Rafah”
The Board of Peace
The image repository in progress
READING → UNDOING → REVERSING READING → UNDOING → REVERSING READING → UNDOING → REVERSING READING → UNDOING → REVERSING READING → UNDOING → REVERSING READING → UNDOING → REVERSING READING → UNDOING → REVERSING
A project by
Noura Tafeche and Donatella Della Ratta
(upcoming)
TBA
(past)
4 October 2026
School of the Image : Constellations Lecture performance
How to Read an Image curated by Nora O’ Murchù
FACT, Liverpool
9 October 2026
School of the Image (TBA)
IULM, Milano
- 24 March 2026
- Moschea di Centocelle, Roma
Image-reading session
14 May 2026
School of the Image : Rendered Erasure Workshop
- TANC, The Apocalypse is Not Coming
- Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
23-24 September 2026
School of the Image : The Colonial Render Workshop
Study of Systems LAB 5 The Mechanics of Truthcurated by Bani Brusadin
Medialab Matadero, Madrid
If you are interested in hosting an image-reading session, a lecture or a workshop,
get in touch
Noura Tafeche is a visual artist and independent researcher with a focus on aesthetization of violence on digital platforms.
Donatella Della Ratta is a
a media ethnographer, performer and curator specialised in networked technologies with a focus on the Arab world.