Study Circle Visby

Images are part of how adolescence is organised today. They shape taste, belonging, fear, desire, identity and agency. They can connect and give language. They can also manipulate, isolate and turn looking into consumption. On Mobilisation and Visual Literacy, developed by Baltic Art Center, starts from this everyday visual pressure. Young people are treated as readers, analysts and makers of visual culture.

The Study Circle asks what visual literacy means now, in digital environments shaped by speed, repetition and artificial intelligence. How are images produced? Who do they serve? What kinds of attention do they train? What happens when adolescents learn to analyse them together and respond with their own visual languages?

Methods and activities are developed with young people aged 16–19, primarily pupils from Visby Upper Secondary School. The wider Study Circle includes representatives and pupils from Film on Gotland, Library Development Gotland, Visby Upper Secondary School, Gotland Art Museum and Uppsala University Graduate School in Sustainability Studies. The research takes the form of peer-to-peer workshops, co-curated public events, exhibitions and other experiments where adolescents work as learners, makers and knowledge producers.

The work is practical: to exchange with young people tools to see how images operate, to recognise when we are being directed by them, and to build visual vocabularies that can be used critically and together.