In March 2025, comrades from across the San Franciso Bay Area and beyond gathered across two facilitated convergence spaces to host Nick Mirzoeff and explore his concept of “seeing in the dark,” a provocation currently in circulation through his recently published work, as part of the VAGABONDS series, To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism. Over two days and as many facilitated spaces, Bay Area poets Steve Dickison, Priscilla Wathington, and Omar Zahzah, as well as members of the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA) and Tierra Milperas convened with others on Saturday afternoon at Tamarack, a collectively run community space in downtown Oakland, and reconvened on Sunday evening at Medicine for Nightmares, a bookstore located in San Francisco’s Mission district.
The Medicine for Nightmares space included an “interactive learning station” anchored by a concept map, or c-map. (See figure 1.) This offered a way to elaborate on “seeing in the dark” and highlight a number of additional strategic concepts from Mirzoeff’s earlier work as a way of seeing the world from Palestine. Generated as tools for shared learning, c-maps can be taped to a wall or projected onto a screen. The c-map in this instance was laid across a large library table. Strategically located, the table divided the bookstore, establishing something of a “peninsula” between rows of books and the open workshop space. The c-map, a 36” by 48” black and white blueprint, was placed across the table, near the edge closest to the path people traversed to enter the workshop space. Provocatively perched at the corner along with marking pens, the c-map invited participants to engage a representation of To See in the Dark. CCRA’s mens rea (or, our “criminal” subversive intent) was to deploy the c-map, as a system of information, to orient the autonomous learning space around tools that might be used to advance the struggle.
Figure 1. C-map for Nicholas Mirzoeff’s To See in the Dark: Palestine and Visual Activism Since October 7.
For CCRA, the autonomous learning space opens a new space of struggle; it recognizes the critical role of knowledge production at the center of struggles from within what we collectively name as the Zapatista conjuncture. Collectively convened, the autonomous learning space can cultivate convivial research and insurgent learning, marking an effort to advance a number of questions critical in confronting the violences organized in the present through Western modernity’s racial patriarchal capitalism. How to recover “historical knowledges of struggle” without forsaking the new knowledge production that is the autonomous, or convivial, or fugitive energies that refuse enclosure, social or material? Since there is no knowledge that is pristine, unassailable, and we refuse to enclose knowledge as legitimate when it has been “tested” or objectified, the world turned into object, we have little use for the expert, i.e., the academic, scientist, technician, or, to borrow from Mirzoeff’s work, we likewise refuse the counterinsurgent commander’s view as it assesses and constructs the Western world as a field of war. Conviviality as a praxis seeks to reclaim knowledge production without reproducing what was once referred to as the “coloniality of power”—without relying on the expert in the room, including the room that organizes destruction from the skies.
With an emphasis on knowledge production at the center of current struggles, the question of shared learning and how we organize ourselves to ponder, listen, and engage becomes a way to explore how we might reclaim the habits of assembly as part of a larger collective struggle for life. Constructed as an interactive learning station, the c-map can serve as a convivial tool to regenerate community by convening people in a common space; the c-map and interactive station focused on Mirzoeff’s work invited folks to congregate, converse, and conspire. Informed by concepts available in the principal text and the discussion it ignited, the c-map became an opportunity to advance thinking together. In short, the c-map offered a way to collectively engage the ideas of the text while also archiving a shared conversation. Practically, the c-map as a system of information intended to bring into focus the book’s principal concept, namely “seeing in the dark,” as well as other strategic concepts available in the text and developed in the hosted spaces.
For CCRA, a strategic concept is a category of analysis that brings into focus a moment of disruption including as epistemic rupture; it is reclaimed through an excavation of previous struggles; it opens a new space of knowledge production as a result of resistance and or refusal. A strategic concept often reflects a certain epistemological obstacle in that it contains elements of concepts that may have become diluted over time through common usage across various strands of struggles or become ensnared in ideological frameworks that render such concepts banal or meaningless. Thus, the strategic concept’s emergence in a particular moment of struggle reflects a complex genealogy that can be excavated towards honing strategic value within the current conjuncture. A strategic concept reflects the present as well, and becomes a way to read the present. In the emergent space of antagonism and opposition, a praxis surfaces and becomes a critical site of collective knowledge production—the recovery of old knowledges and the circulation of new knowledges, including oppositional, subversive, disqualified knowledges but also newly forming knowledges—as part of an advancing autonomy. Thus, “seeing in the dark,” among other strategic concepts available in Mirzoeff’s text, formed the basis for our insurgent learning over the weekend. These concepts in the current moment make visible the chasm between settler “security” and the justification for the state of Israel as well as a people organized around resilience, dignity, and survival.
The c-map displayed during “the talk” on Sunday was an iteration, the second in a series of drafts that reflected a brief dialogue following the initial gathering the previous day at Tamarack. The first draft, it was agreed, needed to bring genocide more into focus, that is to say, to emphasize the opposition and resilience of the Palestinian people and especially those in Gaza who continue to resist Israel’s genocide, the “war” being witnessed in real time across multiple platforms on a range of devices. With the revision, the updated c-map centers the resistance to the genocide, echoing the declaration of Nasser Abourahme: “Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation” (Mirzoeff 7). To see Palestine, the fundamental starting point, is to see and join with the “political subject of radical universal emancipation.” Thus, the c-map engages the intervention that the VAGABONDS pamphlet insists we consider, that is, “to see the world from Palestine’s point of view, rather than seeing Palestine from the world’s point of view” (Mirzoeff 7).
The c-map fulfills one of its principal obligations by attempting to make available one of the key concepts introduced in the text. In this instance, it also recognizes Mirzoeff’s earlier work that lays the foundation for the pamphlet. In To See in the Dark we are reintroduced to the concept of visual activism. Thus, the c-map also revisits visual activism as a strategic concept, highlighting it through an example provided in the text and advancing it as a critical practice. Visual activism enjoins us to “activate the visible,” which first requires we refuse the passive visible, those junk images that accumulate as clutter in the form of advertising, brands, and logos, all of which are circulated through an endless parade of influencers and the like.
In contrast, we should be working toward, or recognizing when, we collectively activate a visible relation, one that articulates the right to look, to be seen, and the right, when necessary, to opacity—all of which, taken together, invite us to, drawing from Fred Moten via Édouard Glissant, “consent not to be a single being” (quoted in Mirzoeff 6). As active seers, working to make our struggle more visible we must embrace “seeing in the dark,” that is a visualization outside “the glare of permanent surveillance.” Such an effort can benefit from an autopsy, or self-examination and the eventual dissociation required to collectively engage the seen. The seen, that which is made more visible and observed, collectively advances in an embodied way through, for example, the global mobilization of encampments. This form of visual activism, according to Mirzoeff and as charted through the c-map, entails visual activism tactics, i.e., counter-masking, conviviality, and commune. Conviviality claimed as part of a praxis of visual activism underscores a refusal to objectify communities of struggle alongside a recognition that struggles recuperate older knowledges while generating newer ones, and this, through a complex rhizome of dispersed knowledge production, or temporary autonomous zones of knowledge production. Connected to the encampments that emerged across university campuses in defiance of the state of Israel’s genocide, the two days we gathered in March emerged as part of a rich rhizome of insurgent learning and resistance.
In the conversation that unfolded over the weekend, theorizations and experiences were circulated from within the student encampments as folks shared stories from encampments at New York University and at San Francisco State University, with connections to quilombos in Brazil, barricades in Oaxaca, encuentros in Chiapas, and asambleas in Pajaro Valley. Highlighting the Zapatistas’ use of palabra, or “the word” as a tool, we noted that “if one cannot speak now, then one can never speak” and shared stories of violence, including sexual violences, that must be named as part of colonialism’s brutal mandate, including those violences at the rotting center of the colonial empire. We affirmed and reiterated that “no matter how much censorship, we have already won.” We have continued to collectively denounce each new act of violence against Palestine. We have committed to the murmuration, the assembly, the autonomous learning space as a way to reclaim knowledge production and claim each other, through relentless acts of fierce care, at once local and transterritorial. Over the weekend, in the conversations activated in the spaces convened at Tamarack and Medicine for Nightmares, we proposed to keep preguntando caminando.
