Introduction

This 3rd number of Sophia[1] from the series Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries, with the theme “Image, Body and Territory”, has as invited Editor Iñaki Bergera, who is an invaluable author and collaborator of the editorial project scopio Editions since its first years of existence. This publication has three major peer-reviewed essays, where its authors challenge our understanding on issues related with the theme “Image, Body and Territory” and where photography practice and discipline is always significantly present. Introducing the notion of a vernacular of economic growth, Kallen McNamara borrows the eyes of Gavin Brown in order to uncover aspects of our daily urban environment that are culturally out of focus, but may be more expressive of our contemporary world than we might like to admit. Her essay is a significant exploration of how a subjective gaze of a particular author, in this case Gavin Brown, is used to critically read in a meaningful manner various aspects of the most conventional and banal aspects of the contemporary urban reality of the city of Houstan. Kallen also makes an interesting creative link between Gavin Brown ́s contemporary gaze and the New Topographics landscape aesthetics, which had a significant effect on photography universe, not only in the United States, but in Europe and, as Kallen bring to light, is an aesthetics still influencing contemporary photographers, as happens in the case of Gavin Brown. Campbell Drake in turn shows how the project Spatial Tuning explores the potential of performance to open up unexpected encounters between landscapes and the public. Investigating how site specific performance can activate engagement with the spatial politics of urban processes, this paper explores the relations between the body, territory and the environmental impact of consumer culture. Centred on a performance event titled Spatial Tuning that took place on the boundary of a municipal rubbish dump in the city of Hobart, Tasmania in 2016, this research is framed within an existing field of practice in which a variety of creative practitioners engage pianos as performative devices to renegotiate situations, subjects and environments. Campbell work, besides other things, makes as question, on the one hand, the political potential of action that site specific performance have for crossing borders and shifting boundaries of certain institutional urban processes, spaces and environments, inducing them to change as a result. In this specific situation, to make people critically reflect on the boundary between a national park and a municipal rubbish dump in the city of Hobart. On the other hand, to question the role and purpose of an art work like Spatial Tuning that has the potential, besides its value as an aesthetic experience by it self, to work as a vehicle to create a background of interference that can trigger a new perception and political action over the urban environment. [...

About the 5th International Conference On the Surface

The 5th International Conference On the Surface: Photography on Architecture - Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image, which took place on the 31st of May 2019 on occasion of MAAT’s Fiction and Fabrication exhibition offered a forum for an interdisciplinary debate on photography and architecture, with a strong editorial component devoted to the publication of original works and ideas at the intersection of these two fields. Aiming to promote the awareness and reflection upon Architecture and Art, namely documentary photography in regard to its conception as an instrument to question the universes of Architecture, City and Territory, the theme chosen for this edition of On the Surface focused on the contemporary transformations of the public space: “Visual Spaces of Change: unveiling the publicness of urban space”. Proposing to debate and explore the potential of Image and Photography as resourceful tools to research and to reflect upon and render visible the emergence of new collective experiences in the social space, the focus was on Documentary and Artistic Photography for addressing crosscutting issues that are shaping contemporary changes in cosmopolitan territories. This conference wanted in this way to contribute for greater social interaction among artistic and cultural institutions and academia, extending the action of museums, universities and art venues beyond their traditionally circumscribed spaces of action, stimulating the agents and institutions involved to be more active and open to debate in their approaches to public space. The intention was to render visible aspects of urban change, as well as how architectures, places and spaces are used and lived, crossing and shifting traditional boundaries for expanding the capacity of institutions to participate in the public domain. In this sense, we aim to contribute for critically thinking architecture as an integrative field of knowledge with historical, cultural, social, economic and political dimensions, and explore photography as a dynamic process of discovery, documentation and reflection that incorporates interpretive, artistic and even fictional aspects of these multiple dimensions. On the Surface 2019 challenged authors and researchers from the fields of photography and architecture to discuss and use image and photography to better understand the city as a living organism, a rich multifaceted space characterized by a variety of experiences and programs, which are a reflection of the knowledge, beliefs, values and customs that characterize different societies. Thus, a central objective of the conference was to discuss in what way image and photography can be used to unveil how architecture expresses the cultural values and identity of our cities, being these critical research instruments for understanding and perceiving architecture in meaningful ways, as well as for understanding the past in order to better grasp the transformations that are increasingly influencing our social practices and place experiences, affecting the modes of citizen participation and cultural interaction. By overlapping and crisscrossing the disciplinary boundaries of Image, Art and Architecture, the borders of these disciplinary fields are challenged for critically thinking through contemporary changes occurring in between physical and virtual dimensions of everyday life. Through the realization of these debates, it was intended to contribute to the creation of a space of exploration, discussion and reflection towards new ideas and research paths about the use of photography as an instrument of visual research and communication, as well as about architecture and the public space, with a focus on emerging dynamics of urban transformation. [...

Open Call – International Drawing and Photography Contest (DPIC): Utopia 500 | Space and Identity of the Universities

We are currently in the third edition (2024) of the International Drawing and Photography Contest (DPIc), a competition integrated in scopio Magazine Architecture, Art and Image publication being directed towards the Identity of Universities spaces of teaching experience and work and open to all academic communities, both in Portugal and abroad