People behind data

Data are never neutral: the way we choose, organise, and display them always tells something about us. The work of Federica Fragapane and Visualizing Palestine shows how visualisation can become a political gesture, capable of giving shape to living and situated stories.

There are thousands of stories to tell, and each can be narrated in different ways. Choosing how to inform and how to represent reality is never a neutral act, especially when data are involved. What does the way we organise, categorise, and visualise information say about us? These questions underpin the work of Federica Fragapane, the Italian information designer who has redefined the aesthetics and politics of data, and of Visualizing Palestine, a collective that uses visualisation as a tool for social justice.

Federica Fragapane is an independent information designer. Over the years, she has created data visualisation projects for the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the Publications Office of the European Union, Google, the BBC, Triennale Milano and La Lettura del Corriere della Sera. She has given guest lectures at Harvard University, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Royal College of Art in London, among others. In 2025, she created the installation Shapes of Inequalities for Triennale Milano, part of the 24th International Exhibition Inequalities. In 2023, three of her data visualisation works became part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, in 2025, they were exhibited in the exhibition Pirouette: Turning Points in Design. She takes an experimental approach to many of her projects, carefully selecting the visual languages with which to invite readers to interpret the stories told by the data.

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Both show how data can be living and situated, and how the way we represent them can become a political act.

A critique against informational neutrality

Federica Fragapane creates data visualisation projects – the graphic translation of complex data and information – and three of her visual works entered the permanent collection of the MoMA in 2023. Through her visual works, Fragapane challenges the presumed neutrality of visual information, placing the individual back at the centre – or rather, individuals: those who live, produce, and observe the data. «My method» she explains «consists in using visual languages able to convey this presence», which does not always mean following linear or classical diagrams. When the project allows for it, she says, «I use many forms that are more organic and soft» and that evoke the organic world, driven by the desire to remind herself and readers of the presence – even when silent or silenced – of a story behind every data point¹. When asked about the accessibility of these forms, she answers, significantly: «As good practice, I try never to take anything for granted, even when a representation seems extremely simple to me. At times I have been told: “they are not canonical, a scatterplot would have been clearer”».

«But those who work in the field take for granted that everyone knows how to read data. It is not so: a language that may seem universal is, in fact, exclusive».

It is therefore a question of language: the language of data visualisation is not yet widespread, and many people are not used to interpreting graphs. For this reason, Fragapane works with familiarity. «It may seem strange, but by recalling natural forms – as I often do – even graphs become more accessible, even when they are more intricate».

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Aesthetics as choice

For Fragapane, freedom of choice always remains central, especially today, at a time when Artificial Intelligence processes and delivers data also in graphic form. She refuses the idea that there is one correct way of doing things, and rejects the “it has always been done this way” mentality, which she sees as a push towards rigidity². Her organic forms are therefore a reaction against the tendency towards standardisation, a way of resisting an algorithmic and impersonal aesthetic. Criticism has not been lacking: «Especially some time ago, when visualisation had to be done in a certain way – geometric, clean, minimal. In a book I often quote, Data Feminism³, there is discussion precisely about how a certain aesthetic has been associated with a form of masculine authority». In Alive, Political Visual Words, Fragapane revisits a key passage from that text: «In the case of data visualisation, what is excluded is emotion and feeling, embodiment and expression, ornament and decoration. These are aspects of human experience associated with women and therefore diminished».

Fragapane does the exact opposite: she chooses to convey, even visually, the fragility of the data themselves – not fragility deriving from the dramatic nature of a phenomenon, but from its constant mutability, as in Iran protests, which visualises the counting of deaths since the start of the protests in the country in 2022⁴, and from its continuous process of emergence, as in her work for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, based on percentages – divided by country – of women who have experienced domestic violence in their lifetime⁵.

«It happens – and I make this explicit – that the numbers from which I create my works are not always perfectly exact or accurate. In these cases, I have told myself that it is still important to talk about them because, even with their inaccuracy, they are able to convey a terrifying and revealing image of a situation or a phenomenon».

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Data as Palestinians’ living memory

Two works, in particular, highlight the information designer’s approach, offering a broad perspective on Israeli apartheid against Palestinians⁶. Back in 2024, Fragapane presented her audience with a small glimpse into the complex Palestinian situation in her work Rafah through three simple numbers: population-density indicators for the city of the same name in the southern Gaza Strip. Three data points which, in their starkness, tell the story of mass displacement, following the Israeli army’s order for Palestinians to evacuate towards the south from other areas of the Strip, dramatically increasing the population density in Rafah.

«I wanted to create an image that felt alive», Fragapane explains, «precisely because I was thinking of people, alive. I tried to work on movement and created this form: a kind of very dynamic and irregular string».

To produce it, she first drew an irregular, dynamic line on her trackpad, designed to evoke constant movement. Along that trace, she then distributed hundreds of green dots, each representing one person per square kilometre. The result shows the October image as sparse, December as denser, and February as almost compact: a single body.

The second work, Gaza, starts from data drawn from an Oxfam report and a Save the Children briefing⁷. The sources indicated that, at that time, the number of Palestinian victims was rising at an average of around 250 people per day – a higher rate than that recorded in other major recent conflicts. They also reported that, in nearly 100 days of Israeli operations in Gaza, more than 10,000 children had been killed. From these data, Fragapane imagines a series of intertwined branches: forms growing upon one another. In the first image, there are 250 branches, representing the average daily victims. In the second, she multiplies them more than a hundredfold. The result is a visual body that speaks of loss, but also of layering and accumulation of information. In both cases, the data become living matter, accessible even without following the imperative of simplification.

Beyond the chronicle of suffering

It is precisely in the attempt to restore presence to Palestinians and render their representation complex – bringing forward that dimension of agency and legitimacy that so often remains in the background – that the work of Federica Fragapane comes close to the aims of the non-profit organisation Visualizing Palestine.

Both, though through different languages and methods, move from a shared political premise: making visible what is systematically obscured, restoring humanity and accountability where dominant narratives tend to erase. Visualizing Palestine is a research and data visualisation project that uses infographics and other visual tools to communicate Palestinian experience and challenge hegemonic narratives. Launched in 2012, the project immediately showcased the potential of digital media to bring stories of Palestinian resistance to a global audience. Their content established a new mode of narration: no longer simply the chronicle of suffering, but a narrative of dignity and resistance. Against the dichotomous representation of Palestinians – victims or terrorists – Visualizing Palestine asserts the complexity and full subjectivity of the bodies and lives it depicts. In doing so, it also recognises Western responsibility in perpetuating the colonial system. Their works – such as Fund Care, Not Killing⁸, where a plant grows from a weapon to show what could be funded instead of arms, or 177 School Buses⁹, a poetic infographic that tries to give visual form to the idea of 177 school buses, the number needed to symbolically contain all the Palestinian children who have lost their lives – are acts of resistance. It must be remembered that the project is born and grows in a context where press and expression freedoms are constantly under threat. Not only their aims, but also the working methods of Visualising Palestine reveal radical care. Their slowness is deliberate: they plan ahead, reject the logic of virality, and favour non-extractive collaborations and collective processes. Among the guiding criteria of the project, one in particular encapsulates everything:

«Human perspective: does this piece aim to convey the impact on real people¹⁰?».

In an era in which communication tends towards simplification and the commodification of information, the works of Federica Fragapane and Visualizing Palestine demonstrate that visualising can be a feminist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist act – a gesture of care and restoration, capable of shaping the way we understand and narrate the world. At the end of the interview, Fragapane says she has too much respect for activists to consider herself one of them. But she recognises, without hesitation, that every act of communication is political. Choosing to assert the humanity of data in a context of death, disinformation, and extreme polarisation becomes, then, a radical gesture and a form of resistance against dehumanisation.

 

1. Fragapane, F. (2023, September 5th). Alive, Political Visual Words. Medium. https://medium.com/@federicafragapane/alive-political-visual-words-65a5e00396e3 ↩︎
2. Fragapane, F. (2023, September 5th). Alive, Political Visual Words. Medium. https://medium.com/@federicafragapane/alive-political-visual-words-65a5e00396e3 ↩︎
3. D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. In The MIT Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11805.001.0001 ↩︎
4. More on the project Protests in Iran https://www.behance.net/gallery/154164323/Iran-protests ↩︎
5. Prevalence of violence in the lifetime, Fragapane, F. (2023, September 5th). Alive, Political Visual Words. Medium. https://medium.com/@federicafragapane/alive-political-visual-words-65a5e00396e3 ↩︎
6. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for decades, characterised by Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the construction of settlements and the imposition of restrictions on the mobility and freedom of the Palestinian population. After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza, causing a serious humanitarian crisis. In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry found that serious human rights violations in the occupied Gaza Strip amounted to genocide. Despite the very recent ceasefire, bombing and military attacks continue, worsening the living conditions of the Palestinian population, from health to economic conditions. ↩︎
7. Gaza, https://www.behance.net/gallery/207824389/Gaza ↩︎
8. Fund Care, Not Killing, Visualizing Palestine, 2025, April 10th: https://visualizingpalestine.org/visual/fund-care-not-killing/ ↩︎
9. 177 School Buses, Visualizing Palestine, 2024, June 7th: https://visualizingpalestine.org/visual/177-school-buses/ ↩︎
10. Visualizing Palestine. (2020, February 13th). Data storytelling for Palestinian rights: Visualizing Palestine’s editorial criteria. Medium. https://visualizingpalestine.medium.com/visualizing-palestines-editorial-criteria-cf347aa92944 ↩︎