Gaza, il buio e l’eloquenza muta dell’immagine. Un laboratorio visuale del contemporaneo

This article examines Gaza as a paradigmatic laboratory of contemporary visual culture, focusing on the intersection of regimes of visibility and invisibility in contemporary warfare. Drawing on visual studies, it argues that modern conflict operates through technologically mediated perception, generating both an excess of images and deliberate forms of opacity, censorship, and erasure that structure what can and cannot be seen. Through episodes such as the Global Sumud Flotilla livestream blackout, the visual testimonies produced and circulated on Palestinian social media during the siege, and the viral spread of AI-generated imagery – including the Trump Gaza video and the All Eyes on Rafah image – the article traces how visuality becomes a decisive and contested battleground. Engaging Nicholas Mirzoeff’s recent work, it proposes that Gaza exemplifies a global mode of “seeing in the dark,” in which counter-visuality, digital witnessing, and grassroots activism challenge the asymmetric optics and extractive gaze of settler-colonial power.