In The Figure of the Migrant (2015), Thomas Nail analyzes the different representations of migrants from political theory. These migratory figures function as “mobile social positions and not fixed identities”. Based on Kinopolitics, Nail describes "movement and mobility as the historical features of the contemporary image" and from this perspective, the Iberian Comic International Lab invites an exploration of image in the Iberian Graphic Narrative and people’s social displacement. The Lab is an opportunity to think the visual characteristics of “displacement” in its etimological sense: the prefix “dis-” (to remove, to separate) and the word “placement” (locate but also from Latin and before Greek as broad way, plain and flat in a town) and together as to “move from one place to another”.

The aftermath of the Spanish Civil War produced the largest exile – as an example of forced displacement – in modern Spanish history and many artists who had developed a career in visual arts venturing as well in the medium of comics had to migrate for political reasons. The Iberian graphic narrative has developed a deep exploration of sociopolitical themes about memory, gender, migration, illness and sexual identity but on few occasions they intersect with questions of race or ethnicity. At the intersection of socioeconomic inequalities, racializing and gentrifying processes, environmental dangers and gender as well as post/de/neocolonial dynamics, comics like Rayco Pulido’s Sin título 2008-2011 (2011), Ramón Eson, Chino and Tenso Tenso’s La pesadilla de Obi (2014), Quan Zhou’s Gazpacho Agridulce (2015) or Ana Penyas’ Todo bajo el sol (2021), reveal the pending challenges of today’s democratic societies.

This second edition of the laboratory is an opportunity to open up the debate and encourage the study of essential themes on displacement in graphic narrative that, for example, explore issues such as racial or ethnic representation, inequalities, or exile. Some of the questions that can guide reflection are: How does inequality displace us? How are ethno-racial dynamics represented or have been represented? What neo/post/colonial patterns underlie the different stories? In what ways do they reflect different ethics and politics of representation? What role does caricature, humor, irony play? How is exile registered in the graphic narrative? What does
the comic contribute to the representation of the contradictions, tensions and concerns of an increasingly plural society?

Abstract submission (250 words): hcscolectivo@gmail.com
Deadline abstract submission: Extended to March 15, 2023