Aesthetics of Risk

"Risk is as much a sensory and aesthetic experience as it is an anticipatory condition. In Aesthetics of Risk , Francesca Laura Cavallo eloquently demonstrates how perceptions of safety or threats materialise across aesthetic dimensions, from safety manuals and data visualisations to survival guides and instructions for surviving disasters. This is an essential contribution to broadening our understandings of risk landscapes." -- Jennifer Gabrys, Chair in Media, Culture and Environment, the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK "Aesthetics of Risk by Francesca Laura Cavallo faces forwards as well as looking back. It offers a sense of how the future of risk and its management (perhaps still conceived as the making of safe spaces) can be harnessed to, or at least comprehended by, modes of accommodation and social amelioration. It questions how we might shore-up 'the predictive vocabulary of risk' against both the predatory and unknowable." -- John C. Welchman, Distinguished Professor of Art History, University of California, USA This book explores the central role of art and design in shaping risk perceptions and behaviours. Guidance, warnings, and protocols of risk management shape how possible futures are imagined and governed . How is this imperative to manage risk transforming contemporary visual language? Are its rhetorics of danger, reassurance, and rationality convincing us that we are prepared--and at what cost? Through the analysis of artworks, warnings, pre-enactments, and data visualisations, the book examines the aesthetic dimension of risk as a diagnostic framework for articulating, narrating, and living with uncertainty. Bringing visual culture into dialogue with risk studies, it reimagines fairer, engaging, and trustworthy ways of communicating and preparing for risk. Francesca Laura Cavallo is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Scoring Warnings at the Royal College of Art, UK. An art historian, curator, and interdisciplinary researcher, she teaches across the Schools of Arts and Humanities and Communication. Her research explores how art intersects with the activation, management, and perception of risk, engaging critically with contemporary art, curatorial practice, and risk theory.