Savva Dudin ~ Borders Crossed, Images Seen: Iconology In the Time of War.

Thesis supervisor: Mayra Rodríquez Castro

Thesis: Borders Crossed, Images Seen: Iconology In the Time of War.

June 2024

Abstract 

This text was born out of the necessity to delete pictures in March 2022 and is saturated with the necessity to see the images behind them. It is devoted to reflecting on the forced exile and deserting from the emergency state of war, which made speaking of violence impossible in Russia. I aim to understand how iconomic power over visible and speakable impacts spectators during the war. The researched subject deals with an urgent need to grasp common mechanisms of power over the visible that are in play in the state of emergency in autocratic political regimes. Methodologically, research interprets the landscape of meanings, applying an understanding approach in cultural sociology and iconological analysis of pictures: both relate surface meanings with in-depth images. The normative discoursive analysis of the main chapters aims to clarify the implications of the iconophilic regime of seeing that resist iconocracy. The modeled polylogue between theorists of the visible will establish a manual for critical reading of deleted images that unfold the affective temporality of the contemporary historical moment in Russia. The result of such reading resides in the appendix: an assemblage of the poetical fragments of speaking and seeing through the deleted pictures that merge into the ecology of images.

Author Savva Dudin