Topology of the
Unshowable: Epistemic Spaces - Aesthetic
Gestures.
A Geography of the Hidden.
„An epistemic misfire“
At the beginning of this project stands a paradox: the attempt to produce an image of something that has never been seen – and perhaps cannot be seen at all. A deliberately induced epistemic misfire. Not a representation, but an echo. Not a depiction, but a resonant space for the invisible, the repressed, the not-yet-recognisable. As Jacques Derrida reminds us: “There is nothing outside the text” – no pure presence, no unbroken image.^1
“Simulate the failure of representation” – this imperative forms the core of the project. It is not about rendering visible in the conventional sense, but about an aesthetic-philosophical gesture. Georges Didi-Huberman, writing on the visibility of trauma, urges us to “interrupt the gaze without averting it” – to understand the image not as evidence, but as wound.^2
The form of the project – a poetic-essayistic, non-linear and intermedial structure of the website – is itself conceived as an epistemic statement. It resists the expectations of clarity, linearity, and objectivity, and instead opens up space for ambiguity, affect, and movement. In the spirit of Édouard Glissant, this is an ethics of opacity: the right not to be fully legible, to remain relational within the unfinished.^3
Thus,
this project may also be read as a
political act. It opposes the normalised
logics of academic production – impact
factor, output, utility – and instead
embraces an ethics of openness,
vulnerability, and radical relation.
Karen Barad speaks here of an
“ethico-onto-epistemology”,
where knowledge is not distanced, but
entangled – with matter, bodies, and
responsibility.^4
Wild research here
means to understand not-knowing not as a
deficit, but as a space of potential –
as an invitation to encounter without
purpose, but with accountability. It is
a thinking
with
the unshowable – not
about
it.
-
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.
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Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 92.
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Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 189.
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Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 90–91.
