What Emerges in Submersion? | Experiences, Practices, and Politics from Below (2026)
What Emerges in Submersion? | Experiences, Practices, and Politics from Below (2026)
Friday, 20.02.2026, 19:30
diffrakt | centre for theoretical periphery, Berlin
Whether as ocean, earth or soil, as a metaphorical or symbolic underworld or as a political figure of thought: the underground has become a central point of reference in current debates on ecological, social and postcolonial conflicts as well as power asymmetries in the humanities and beyond. However, turning to the underground is never merely a thematic framing. It implies a conceptual and methodological movement - a practice of going underground - that requires a critical reflection on the conditions, technologies, aestheticsand politics of knowledge production.
In The Extractive Zone (2017),MacarenaGómez-Barriscoined the term "submerged modes" to describe complex and resistant forms of life and knowledge. These social ecologies are embedded in specific material and media environments - characterised by industrial and digital capitalist as well as neo-colonial exploitation, dispossession and surveillance - while at the same time resisting these power relations. Due to their immaterial density and illegible heterogeneity, such perspectives elude an "extractive gaze" from above: Ways of knowing that aim at totalising representation, (scientific) disciplining and capitalist exploitation. Instead, they call for methods and perspectives that are themselves submerged - a perception from below.
Marie Sophie Beckmann, Petra Löffler and Amelie Wedel discuss the critical potential of sub(e)merging in dialogue with contemporary film and video works. What challenges does sub(e)merging pose for dominant modes of representation? How can going beneath the surface become a position from which perception, speech and action can be organised differently? And to what extent does sub(e)merging destabilise the ground itself as a site of evidence and knowledge production?