Framer Framed

7 Sep 2025
16:00 - 18:00

Launch: Errant Journal #8, Against Visibility (or, the Right to Opacity)

Framer Framed and Errant Journal are happy to invite you to the launch of Errant’s eighth issue titled Against Visibility (or, the Right to Opacity). During the launch, writer Nadine Monem discusses her contribution ‘Om Kolsoum’s Sunglasses (on Redaction, the Hijab, and the Imperial Idea)’. Editor-in-chief Irene de Craen introduces the issue as a whole and the programme ends with a conversation between Nadine and Irene, welcoming questions and comments from the audience.

The eighth issue of Errant Journal questions the ways in which hegemonic culture and discourse tends to prioritise the ideal of openness, access, transparency and visibility. Delving into topics such as face coverings, ‘coming out’ in queer discourses, the use of opacity in transformative justice and different strategies of (visual) resistance, Against Visibility can be read as a proposition of refusal of the paradigm of visibility and access that permeates all areas of western thinking. At a moment in which representation and uncovering ‘lost’ histories are trending, Errant asks what is being erased in a world where everything must always be visible. When Édouard Glissant proclaimed the right to opacity, he sought not to be reduced or to be measured against an ideal scale in order to be understood and accepted. Expanding from this, Against Visibility looks into the ways in which unlearning imperialism also includes unlearning the ideal of visibility itself.

Nadine Monem is an Egyptian-Canadian writer working in hybrid autotextual modes and anti-colonial poetics. Her work has been published or supported by Tin House Books, Catapult Books, The Sewanee Review, The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast Journal, The Seventh Wave, and The Literary Consultancy.

Contributors
Vivi Alfonsín, Leila Ben Abdallah, Mariam Ben Slama, Michèle Boulogne, Irene de Craen, AmaraChíkà Emele-Ralph, Cosmo M. Esposito, Jamie McGhee, Ludovica Micalizzi, Nadine Monem, Pieter Paul Pothoven, Musa Shadeedi & Federica Stagni.

Credits

Errant Journal is a cultural/political publication loosely inspired by Édouard Glissant´s notion of the Poetics of Relation in which he opposes ideas of centers, linearity, roots and dichotomy. Errant, meaning both ‘deviating from an accepted norm’ and ‘wandering’, represents a way of breaking free from the idea of identity based on origin and the possibility to possess a totality of knowledge. It is never the goal to know everything, to see and understand something in its entirety. Instead, a person who is ‘errant’ rejects the universal and challenges the idea that the world is transparent and explainable.

Framed Framed is founding partner of Errant Journal, a concept of Irene de Craen.

Links

• Errant Journal - Online Store
• Errant Journal

Agenda

Network

Nadine Monem

Writer

Michèle Boulogne

Irene de Craen

Writer, researcher and curator