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Paper short abstract

Based on hospital ethnography, this paper examines polarisation as a productive tension between regimes of medical visibility. It explores how collaborative visual practices render uncertainty visible and generate alternative forms of knowledge in visual anthropology.

Paper long abstract

In contemporary hospital environments, polarisation rarely appears as explicit ideological conflict. Rather, it emerges through ongoing tensions between regimes of visibility: what can be shown and legitimised as medical evidence, what remains invisible or unspeakable, and whose experiences are rendered intelligible within dominant visual cultures of care. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in hospital settings with patients affected by conditions marked by diagnostic and prognostic uncertainty, this paper examines visual practices as sites where such tensions are negotiated rather than resolved.

Building on perspectives in visual anthropology that understand images not merely as representational tools but as relational and ethical spaces, I analyse a series of collaborative visual experiments developed with patients, healthcare professionals, and artists. These practices—ranging from participatory drawing to experimental visual forms of restitution—do not seek to overcome conflict or reconcile divergent perspectives. Instead, they sustain what I conceptualise as an hospitality of uncertainty, in which polarisation is approached as a productive tension that reveals the conditions under which representation itself becomes possible.

In a visually saturated medical environment dominated by imaging technologies that claim objectivity and transparency, such alternative visual languages create space for affects, ambiguities, and forms of knowledge that resist textual or diagnostic translation. By foregrounding the ethical and methodological challenges of making uncertainty visible without instrumentalising it, this paper argues that reflexive engagements with polarisation can generate new visual grammars of care. These grammars do not aim at consensus, but at sustaining attention, negotiation, and co-presence in polarised worlds.