Structurally Unseeable: The Invisibility of Collective Risk in the Enschede Fireworks Disaster
(2026) KOVM12 20261Division of Art History and Visual Studies
- Abstract
- On 13 May 2000, a fireworks depot exploded in a residential neighbourhood in Enschede, the Netherlands, killing 23 people and injuring nearly a thousand. Throughout the 1990s, Dutch biopolitical safety campaigns made the individual dangers of fireworks highly visible: the misused firework, the mutilated hand, the personal consequence. The collective risk of a depot in a residential area, by contrast, remained invisible. Approached through visual culture, this thesis asks from what perspective, if any, collective fireworks risk could have been visually recognised prior to the disaster.
The study examines three bodies of empirical material: SIRE fireworks campaigns from the years preceding the explosion, photographs of the destruction... (More) - On 13 May 2000, a fireworks depot exploded in a residential neighbourhood in Enschede, the Netherlands, killing 23 people and injuring nearly a thousand. Throughout the 1990s, Dutch biopolitical safety campaigns made the individual dangers of fireworks highly visible: the misused firework, the mutilated hand, the personal consequence. The collective risk of a depot in a residential area, by contrast, remained invisible. Approached through visual culture, this thesis asks from what perspective, if any, collective fireworks risk could have been visually recognised prior to the disaster.
The study examines three bodies of empirical material: SIRE fireworks campaigns from the years preceding the explosion, photographs of the destruction left behind, and the Oosting Commission report on the institutional distribution of oversight. It employs visual discourse analysis to read these materials through Foucault's biopolitics, Mbembe's necropolitics, Jay's scopic regimes, and Mirzoeff's distinction between vision and visuality.
The thesis argues that the invisibility of collective risk was produced by two mutually reinforcing conditions. First, the campaigns and the aftermath photographs belong to incompatible scopic regimes: one rendering risk as individual, bodily, and behavioural, the other as collective, spatial, and catastrophic. They share no common visual grammar. Second, the institutional apparatus that might have synthesised them had itself lost its central viewpoint: drawing on Byung Chul Han's aperspectival panopticon and Liljefors' three blindnesses of technovision, the thesis shows that oversight in 2000 was dissolving from centralised panoptic structures into distributed networks, leaving no position from which the incompatibility of regimes could be recognised. Recent regional reports suggest this condition remains unresolved. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9233953
- author
- Jasper, Sharona LU
- supervisor
- organization
- alternative title
- The Invisibility of Collective Risk in the Enschede Fireworks Disaster
- course
- KOVM12 20261
- year
- 2026
- type
- H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
- subject
- keywords
- risk visibility, biopolitics, necropolitics, aperspectival panopticon, scopic regimes, fireworks disaster
- language
- English
- id
- 9233953
- date added to LUP
- 2026-06-12 09:36:46
- date last changed
- 2026-06-12 09:36:46
@misc{9233953,
abstract = {{On 13 May 2000, a fireworks depot exploded in a residential neighbourhood in Enschede, the Netherlands, killing 23 people and injuring nearly a thousand. Throughout the 1990s, Dutch biopolitical safety campaigns made the individual dangers of fireworks highly visible: the misused firework, the mutilated hand, the personal consequence. The collective risk of a depot in a residential area, by contrast, remained invisible. Approached through visual culture, this thesis asks from what perspective, if any, collective fireworks risk could have been visually recognised prior to the disaster.
The study examines three bodies of empirical material: SIRE fireworks campaigns from the years preceding the explosion, photographs of the destruction left behind, and the Oosting Commission report on the institutional distribution of oversight. It employs visual discourse analysis to read these materials through Foucault's biopolitics, Mbembe's necropolitics, Jay's scopic regimes, and Mirzoeff's distinction between vision and visuality.
The thesis argues that the invisibility of collective risk was produced by two mutually reinforcing conditions. First, the campaigns and the aftermath photographs belong to incompatible scopic regimes: one rendering risk as individual, bodily, and behavioural, the other as collective, spatial, and catastrophic. They share no common visual grammar. Second, the institutional apparatus that might have synthesised them had itself lost its central viewpoint: drawing on Byung Chul Han's aperspectival panopticon and Liljefors' three blindnesses of technovision, the thesis shows that oversight in 2000 was dissolving from centralised panoptic structures into distributed networks, leaving no position from which the incompatibility of regimes could be recognised. Recent regional reports suggest this condition remains unresolved.}},
author = {{Jasper, Sharona}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Structurally Unseeable: The Invisibility of Collective Risk in the Enschede Fireworks Disaster}},
year = {{2026}},
}