Special Issue: Archives of Trauma- Visual Arts, Cinema, Design, and Architecture
Special Issue: Archives of Trauma
Guest editors: Eleni Mouzakiti, Penelope Petsini (University of West Attica)
Bringing together researchers, theorists, artists, filmmakers, architects, designers, and practitioners, the special issue Archives of Trauma: Visual Arts, Cinema, Design, and Architecture explores trauma as both lived experience and cultural imprint across the fields of the visual arts, cinema and audiovisual media, design, architecture, and spatial practice. The issue provides a platform for interdisciplinary research and critical reflection on the ways in which photography, film, contemporary art, moving-image practices, graphic and exhibition design, architecture, built environments, memorial spaces, archives, and other visual and spatial forms engage with memory, loss, violence, mourning, survival, and processes of historical and personal reconstruction.
The special issue welcomes historical, theoretical, analytical, artistic, and practice-based contributions that investigate the representation, mediation, and material inscription of trauma across different historical, political, social, and cultural contexts. It is especially interested in the ways artistic, cinematic, architectural, and design practices shape experiences of visibility and absence; preserve, activate, or suppress memory; and frame encounters with violence, loss, displacement, and historical rupture.
Trauma is approached here as an ongoing condition that continues to shape the present, permeating individual and collective experience. Through archival images, films, artistic interventions, documentary practices, architectural forms, spatial arrangements, memorial sites, exhibition strategies, and hybrid visual media, artists and researchers transform cultural material into carriers of memory, sites of negotiation, and spaces for processing loss and imagining forms of repair. In this context, the archive emerges as a dynamic and contested field in which visibility, silence, absence, testimony, material traces, and institutional power intersect.
Topics may include, but are not limited to: war, civil wars, political violence, genocide, and displacement; migration, exile, borders, and diasporic memory; crisis, austerity, and precarity as traumatic conditions; gendered, queer, familial, and intergenerational trauma; illness, disability, the body, psychiatry, institutionalisation, and asylums; family archives, vernacular photography, and domestic memory; postmemory, affect, and the transmission of trauma; ecological catastrophe, environmental loss, and damaged landscapes; erasure, state violence, and contested public histories; prisons, camps, institutions, and other spaces of confinement and exclusion; the architecture of violence, destruction, reconstruction, and repair; graphic design, publishing, and visual communication in relation to memory and trauma.
The guest editors invite contributions from a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, including visual culture studies, art history, photography theory, film and media studies, architecture and architectural history, design history and theory, spatial and urban studies, memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, and artistic research. Articles should range between 4,000 and 8,000 words. The issue will also include review essays on academic books and/or curated exhibitions (1,500–2,000 words); visual essays (1,000–3,000 words, plus 10–15 images); and artist, filmmaker, architect, or designer portfolios (artist statement, project description, and 10–15 images).
Submission deadline: 10 October 2026
