Haunted Images – Toxic Ecologies of Photography

From October 12 to 16, 2026, the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) Offenbach welcomes Sara Benaglia from the Libera Accademia di Belle Arti (LABA) in Brescia, Italy, one of its ERASMUS+ partner institutions. A lecturer in contemporary art, Benaglia will join Professor Martin Liebscher’s teaching area for a week of lectures and academic exchange.

During her visit, Benaglia will present Haunted Images: Toxic Ecologies of Photography, a four-part lecture series that explores photography beyond its conventional understanding as a medium of representation. Across the sessions, she examines images as material and temporal processes shaped by ecological conditions, political structures, and more-than-human forms of agency.

What happens to photographs over time? How do chemical processes, resource extraction, and environmental change shape the images we produce? And what does authorship mean when materials, algorithms, and biological processes all contribute to the creation of an image? These questions form the starting point for a series that invites participants to reconsider photography as an unstable, evolving, and deeply interconnected practice.

The programme opens on Tuesday, October 13, with Haunted Images: Beyond Representation (14:30–16:00, Schloss, 2nd floor, Room C-206). Benaglia approaches photography as a hauntological medium in which images are not simply records of the past but sites of persistence, spectrality, and non-linear temporality. Rather than treating photographs as fixed objects to be interpreted, the lecture explores how images continue to act, change, and shape our experience of time.

On Wednesday, October 14, the second lecture, Toxic Materialities: Chemistry, Decay, and Life (14:30–16:00, Schloss, 2nd floor, Room C-206), turns to the material and ecological conditions of photography. Focusing on chemical transformations, toxicity, and decomposition, Benaglia examines how images mutate over time. Decay emerges not merely as a threat to preservation but also as a process through which images develop new forms of material vitality.

The third session, Extractivism and the Geological Image, takes place on Thursday, October 15 (10:00–11:30, Schloss, 2nd floor, Room C-206). Here, photography is situated within the global systems of resource extraction and material production on which it depends. Beginning with silver mining and colonial infrastructures, the lecture traces the connections between photographic technologies, environmental exploitation, and labour, highlighting the geological and political dimensions of image-making.

The series concludes on Friday, October 16, with Posthuman Agency and Distributed Authorship (10:00–11:30, Schloss, 2nd floor, Room C-206). This final lecture addresses changing notions of authorship in contemporary art and image practices. By considering the roles of matter, algorithms, and biological processes, Benaglia explores how creative agency can be distributed across human and non-human actors, challenging established ideas of artistic ownership and copyright.

Together, the four lectures offer an opportunity to engage with contemporary debates in photographic theory and practice while examining the broader ecological, political, and material networks in which images exist. Benaglia’s visit also creates space for exchange between students and faculty at HfG Offenbach and an international academic perspective, strengthening the collaboration between the two institutions.

All lectures will be held in English. Students and anyone interested in photography, contemporary art, and the material conditions of image-making are warmly invited to attend.