The Colonial Render. Reading, undoing and reversing images | Noura Tafeche and Donatella Della Ratta

We live inside an unprecedented flood of images: generative visuals, synthetic faces, 3D renderings, video leaks, livestreams, surveillance footage, memes. Images circulate faster than our capacity to look at them, let alone understand them. At the same time, we are exposed daily to images of extreme violence, domination, and power, consumed individually yet experienced collectively. 

Every image exists in relation to others: images that precede it, images it answers to, images it contradicts or erases. Every image looks back.  

In the age of predictive and speculative media, images not only represent the future, they actively participate in producing it. Renderings of cities, territories, and infrastructures, for example, are used to guide genocidal, political and economic decisions, often by actors distant from the places depicted, reshaping social, environmental, and cultural realities before they even exist. 

We seek to unpack these relations together, tracing the ethical, political, economic and emotional circuits that connect one image to another, and collectively producing meaning rather than receiving it passively. 

Rather than asking whether an image is true or false, we ask: what does it do? what does it connect to? What does it demand from us? 

The Colonial Render is a two-day collective laboratory that proposes to slow down the act of seeing, restoring time, attention to our relationship with images. It is one of the first iterations of the broader The School of the Image project by Tafeche and Della Ratta. 

Rather than treating images as objects to be consumed or verified, the workshop invites participants to read, dissect, and reconstruct images together, developing a shared toolkit for a predictive media literacy, where meaning emerges collectively rather than being passively received. 

 

Talk (public event, free entry): 

7pm Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

Workshop (with registration)

4pm - 8pm Thursday, September 24, 2026
11am - 8pm Friday, September 25, 2026

12 seats plus auditors. 
Price: free, prior registration. 
Who is it for: artists, designers, photographers, architects, activists, journalists, historians and anyone interested in the life and afterlife of synthetic imagery, technological mediations, and colonialism. 

→ Sign up here 

 

Workshop description:

1. Conceptual Framework 

2. Workshop Format (2 days) 

3. Methodology: Cutting Into Images 

4. Input: mapping, case studies, components 

5. Output: a Toolkit for Media Literacy 

6. About Noura Tafeche and Donatella Della Ratta

 

Conceptual Framework 

The dominant mode of engaging with images today is solitary, fragmented, and accelerated. We scroll alone, react alone, archive alone. This isolation weakens our capacity to think, feel, and act collectively. 

The School of the Image proposes a simple but radical shift: seeing is a collective act. Images are not explained by experts, but read together. Meaning does not pre-exist, it emerges through dialogue, friction, and shared interpretation. 

The project is inspired by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, especially his idea that understanding how we see images reveals crucial insights about ourselves and about the historical and political conditions we inhabit. It also draws from Jean-Luc Godard’s notion of shot / reverse shot (notably in Notre Musique), treating images not as isolated entities, but as relationships: every image exists in relation to others, to what precedes it, what it erases, what it answers to, what it contradicts. 

In the age of synthetic media — where documentary images coexist with generated ones, and reality is no longer grounded in mimetic representation — Tafeche and Della Ratta shift the focus from authenticity and truth-value to relation. 
 

Workshop Format (2 days) 

The laboratory is structured as a collective learning environment where participants work together on selected case studies and on their own chosen images. 

Each session is based on shared looking: images are projected, discussed, compared, dismantled, and placed in relation with counter-images, archives, and absences. 

Facilitators select and introduce visual materials, but do not provide closed interpretations. The emphasis is on co-presence, collective reading, and critical imagination. 

 

Methodology: Cutting Into Images 

The workshop proposes a practice of cutting into images together, through three main operations: 

1. Reading – observing, describing, slowing down perception. 

2. Undoing – dismantling and extruding the image into layers (technical, aesthetic, political, fictional, factual) and reconstructing its backdrop: the hidden infrastructures, production contexts, territories, populations, and social, historical, and algorithmic layers that shape the image’s creation and circulation. 

3. Reversing – reconstructing genealogies, sources, and circuits of circulation. 

Images are treated as onions: layered structures that must be peeled, even if this process is uncomfortable. 

A central aim of the workshop is to provide what we call the backdrop of images: the set of invisible layers that every image compresses into a single surface. Images are treated as results of an extrusion process: what we see is only the visible output of multiple underlying strata: technical, institutional, geopolitical, social, historical, economic and platform-driven layers (such as virality, hype, and attention economies). 

For example, a 3D rendering of a futuristic city such as Neom is not only a visual object, but a dense assemblage of the architecture studio that produced it, the software pipeline that generated it, the institutionalized futurism it promotes, the territory it occupies, and the populations whose histories and futures are being overwritten by that representation. 

At the same time, synthetic images operate as prediction and speculation: they are used to inform real political and economic decisions, often taken by distant actors and foreign institutions, about places, environments, and communities that do not yet exist in the form depicted. In this sense, images do not merely represent possible futures — they actively participate in producing and governing them 

The workshop trains participants to reverse this compression: to extrude the image back into its constituent layers, reconstructing the infrastructures, interests, and power relations that shape what appears as a neutral or self-evident visual surface. 

The aim is to resist superficial consumption and to expose the hidden genealogic infrastructures behind images. 

 

Input: mapping, case studies, components 

1. Conceptual Mapping 

Facilitators present a conceptual map organized by: 

• image archives 

• references 

• associations 

• genealogies

This visual map functions as a living knowledge system, where images are extruded into their underlying layers, serving as a shared starting point for the group. 

2. Case Studies 

As ice-breaking game, facilitators propose the group to analyze emblematic and ambiguous visual cases, such as: 

• Synthetic reconstructions and institutional renderings (excerpt from NEOM) 

• Hybrid images mixing reality and fictional elements (AI Al Aqsa burning) 

• Visual parodies that produce real political consequences (Trump Gaza) 

• Speculative renderings used as evidence (IDF uses Scottish Museum props). 

• FIFA and the Board of Peace have announced (26 Feb 2026) they are building 55 football pitches, a FIFA academy and a national stadium in Gaza (Official Video) 

This would include 3D visualizations of infrastructures, reconstructions, AI-generated images. Three elements are compared, analyzed together rather than individually, making visible the connections between shot and counter-shot. 

Each case will be analyzed through three interrelated components: 

Factual components  
The aspects of the image that are officially documented or verifiable.  
 
A. NEOM's platform Ground X satellite images produced by official authorities to proof investors 
B. the aerial views, the satellite images and the Palestinian documentations of the destruction of the land of Gaza. 

Fictional components  
The speculative or imaginative aspects of the image.  
 
For example, NEOM does not yet exist, and projects like The Line may never be realized, but the images are presented in an institutionalized context to shape perceptions and beliefs as the 3D renderings are produced and released by official authorities. 
 
In the Trump Gaza example, the AI imagery was not officially produced by the White House, but it was circulated and amplified by political actors, making it consequential despite its unofficial status. The imagery is a hybrid: some audiences recognize it as ironic, yet it echoes real architectural proposals (e.g. Kushner’s presentations at the World Economic Forum 2026), blending fact and fiction in a persuasive way. 
 
A. NEOM does not yet exist, and projects like The Line may never be realized, yet the images shape perceptions, expectations and trades. 
 
B. Political parodies, such as the “Trump Gaza” imagery, blend fact and fiction in ways that are persuasive and consequential. 

Hyperstitional components  
The elements that actively prepare the ground for a possible future, shaping expectations, desires, or policies. These images do not merely represent the world; they act as performative instruments, signaling or legitimizing future developments, often in ethically and politically charged ways.  
Both NEOM renderings and viralized political imagery function hyperstitionally, influencing imagination, policy, and public perception before reality catches up. 

This framework allows participants to read, dissect, and compare images not in isolation, but in relation to each other, revealing the technical, institutional, political, and affective forces that shape visual production and circulation. 

 

Output: a Toolkit for Media Literacy 

Participants trace the genealogy of a chosen image, mapping sources, references, related images, and circulation paths, then translate this research into operative visualizations—diagrams, maps, collages, or visual essays—that reveal relationships, contradictions, and hidden production layers. All individual outputs feed into a shared, collective toolkit for media literacy, highlighting factual, fictional, and hyperstitional components, circulation circuits, and political, social, and emotional effects. 

 

About Noura Tafeche and Donatella Della Ratta 

 

Noura Tafeche is a visual artist and independent researcher whose work and research practice examine the aesthetics of online microcultures, experimentation with language, and the visual representation of speculative imaginaries. In recent years, Tafeche has worked extensively on online and offline phenomena related to visual trends of "hyper-cuteness" and sexualization on social media, and their influence on what she calls the rise of digital militarism. Tafeche draws on posthumanist and critical studies with the aim of hybridizing them, with a strong influence from net.art and radical humor. 

Donatella Della Ratta is a scholar, writer, performer, and curator specializing in Arab media and cultures. She teaches at John Cabot University in Rome and is a former Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen and at the Annenberg School for Communication, Pennsylvania University, and an Affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Della Ratta has authored three monographs on Arab media and curated chapters on Syrian media and politics in several collective books. She is a contributor to Italian and international media outlets such as Al Jazeera English, Hyperallergic, Internazionale, and Il Manifesto. She has professional experience as a journalist, TV author and producer, and managed the Arabic-speaking community of the international NGO Creative Commons www.creativecommons.org for five years (2008-2013).  She has curated several art exhibitions and film programs on Syria, and she is a co-founder and board member of the web aggregator on creative resistance SyriaUntold, recipient of the Digital Communities award at Ars Electronica 2014. 
Her most recent book, Violenza Speculativa, will be released in the Fall 2026.

About Estudio de Sistemas (Study of Systems)
 

This is the fourth installment of the 2026 season of Estudio de Sistemas (Study of Systems), a regular program of workshops, talks, and seminars aimed at fostering creative intuition and methodological experimentation around emerging and unstable technologies. It’s part of Medialab’s LAB 5 The Mechanics of Truth thematic program.