Sketching affects: enacting human rights as relationships

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.