On the Surface - photography on architecture
Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space

5th edition of the international conference

On occasion of MAAT’s Fiction and Fabrication exhibition, the 5th International Conference ON THE SURFACE: Photography on Architecture (31st May) offers 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. The theme chosen for this edition On the Surface is focused in contemporary transformations of the public space: “Visual Spaces of Change: unveiling the publicness of urban space” proposes to debate and explore the potential of Image and Photography as resourceful tools to research, reflect upon and render visible the emergence of new collective experiences in the social space.

ON THE SURFACE: Photography on Architecture aims to promote international debates on Architecture, Art and Image, with a focus on Documentary and Artistic Photography for addressing crosscutting issues that are shaping contemporary changes in cosmopolitan territories. This conference aims 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. We want 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.

About this collection

The collection Debates is the medium of disclosure of the authors that had participated in debates, conferences through articles, projects or works seen of interest and with significative quality. Works that in a way promote a widen reflection on Architecture images, being understood as a practice and a discipline able to integrate the social-economic, political, historical and technical domains. This means, between other things, to reflect about the contribute of the images in the comprehension of reality and the construction of imaginaries, between the document and the fiction, between the reproduction and the manipulation, between the analog and the digital. The collection, which will be opened to many conferences, will be the main medium of disclosure of the internacional conference On the Surface.

The universe of interest of the scopio Editions is, in general terms, the one of Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) and, in specific terms, the one of the Documental and Artistic Photography related to Architecture, City and Territory.

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SCOPIO EDITIONS
DEBATES COLLECTION
Porto, 2019

48 pages
ISBN 978-989-54318-5-4