City Research Online

Abstract

This essay draws on the work of art historian and activist John Berger to explore how sketching and the sketchbook afford an opportunity to rethink human rights as a set of affective relations that are enacted between people regardless of national borders. In its first part, it offers a reading of Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook (2011), where in dialogue with Spinoza he argues that sketches capture a shared affect between artists and the subjects of their work, whether human subjects or non-human objects. In its second part, the essay brings this idea into conversation with the artist Joss López’s crowd-funded and independently published book of narrative art, Serres: Reportage of a Journey Through Sketching (2022). Presented as a sketchbook and containing images that deliberately perform the aesthetics of the sketch, Serres documents the artist’s experience working together with refugees, volunteers, and support workers in the eponymous Greek city. By combining the Spinozan philosophy of Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook with an analysis of López’s Serres, the essay argues that sketching points to a radical re-conceptualisation of human rights as enacted relationships between subjects, rather than as a set of individual entitlements that must be granted and recognised by national or supra-national states.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2026 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med-ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this articlehas been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	Sketching, human rights, borders, graphic narrative, John Berger, Joss López
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare J Political Science N Fine Arts > NC Drawing Design Illustration
Departments:	School of Communication & Creativity School of Communication & Creativity > Department of Media, Culture & Creative Industries
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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