Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries
The Aura Of The Image

In the first number of Sophia publication, we published three major essays that challenged our understanding and spread new light on several Walter Benjamin’s concepts on photography and art, at the same time we were continuously defied to think about established categories namely those of photography as document, archive, critical witness, or even as critique in itself.

In the upcoming number, we would like to push further and go beyond these notions perceiving how they are critically inscribed in the works of art themselves. We are especially interested in unfolding the processes of thought present in photographic, filmic, or other works engaged with image and image making, that explore the notions of Body and Territory or use them as their own expressive matters.

Body and Territory frequently appear intertwined, sometimes even suggesting metaphorical uses: the city as a body (in the multiple acceptations: political, social, cultural, etc.), the body as an experimental territory (on debates around issues of identity and gender, works involving artistic and aesthetic experimentations, works for anthropological documentation and recording), the landscape in the absence of the body, as Cézanne named it, establishing a direct link between the painted landscape (the image) and our sensitive perception.

Our magazine is now accepting abstracts within these fundamental themes in order to unveil how an image, a photograph or a series, or a film critically and poetically build their own thought about the body and the territory, and, above all, how they contribute and appear engaged in architectural and/ or urban processes.

SCOPIO EDITIONS
SOPHIA COLLECTION
Porto, 2016

72 pages
ISSN 2183-8976