Abstract

Focusing on subjective processes of globalization, this practice-based research looks at the ideological shift from the “modern social imaginary” to the “global imaginary”. In particular, it investigates major changes that are giving rise to a new visual regime of representation and signification in selected global and fast globalizing cities across the planet. In doing so, this study observes that the circulation of a particular type of socio-historically and ideologically charged global images is creating a new aesthetic affective landscape that is transforming urban spaces, increasingly mediating local-national meaning, while contributing to the destabilization of the modern self-contained nation-state. Yet, there is a dearth of scholarship investigating the link among “social imaginary,” ideology, and these new figures of knowledge of the global that constitute an ever-increasing cultural horizon within which people frame, with varying degrees and nuances, their phenomenological existence—everyday life. In this respect, it is argued that, to better understand globalization as a material and ideational process, one cannot disregard investigating its “visual-ideological” dimension. Thus, exemplified by a given body of visual images displayed in their own right, with one of them analyzed and interpreted to better understand the socio-political and cultural implications, this inquiry, theoretically and methodologically articulated, is carried out through photographic fieldwork and the lenses of social and political theory. In doing so, it is observed that the production, circulation, and consumption of ideologically charged media representations in defined socio-historical contexts constitute the “visual ideological apparatus”—the “visual ideology”—of globalization.