Contemporary Visualities is a compulsory subject in the third year of the Fine Arts degree at the University of Barcelona. Taking as a reference the field of visual culture studies (October, 1996; Elkins, 2003; Hernández, 2005), the subject offers a series of theoretical-methodological frameworks for analyzing the historicity and forms of socialization of images both in contemporary times and in the past. In Visualities, students are invited to adopt a rhizomatic logic (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003), based on the principles of multiplicity and rupture, to establish new connections between images (whether artistic or not) and to recognise the constructed nature of all of them. One of the premises of the course is to invite students to move from the tradition that considers images as spaces of representation to be deciphered, to consider what images 'do' and what they allow us to 'do'. The course is organized through a) explanatory sessions, open to debate; b) the reading and discussion of texts (first in small groups and then as part of a broader sharing); c) the shared approach to key concepts; d) the intervention in class of artistic and/or educational agents related to the orientation of the subject; c) visits to exhibitions and museums, and d) the use of cartographies. This last strategy intends to be inventive (Lury and Wakeford, 2012) and allows for the articulation of new links between heterogeneous materials (images, documents, quotations, spaces, people, and things, etc.), thereby making it possible to configure "multiplicities or aggregates of intensities" (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 15). In so doing, cartographies have also encouraged students to situate, elaborate and expand issues of visual culture. In the four courses in which co-teaching has taken place so far, the cartographic exercises have favored breaking ranks in the classroom, inhabiting it in a different way and developing a theoretical practice around the visual that is different from what the students had envisaged.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2003). Rizoma (Introducción). Valencia: Pre-textos. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi. London: Continuum. Elkins, J. (2003). Visual Studies. A Skeptical Introduction. New York, London: Routledge. Hernández, F. (2005). “¿De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de cultura visual?”. Educaçâo e Realidade, 30(2), 9-34. Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (2012). Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social (Culture, Economy, and the Social). New York: Routledge. October (1996). Visual Culture Questionnaire. October, 77, 25-70.