the instrument to see
The choice of the name scopio for this maga(zine) is related directly to the word’s etymology – a Greek root meaning instrument to look through a hollow organ, thus being connected to the act of observing and capturing light through the camera.
editorial
Research group CCRE of FAUP I&D centre – CEAU - jointly with Editorial and Advisory Board of scopio Magazine continues to innovate its editorial structure and team with the intention of refining the Magazine´s structure, introducing some new features regarding its organization, sections and collaborators, as well as the potential for the creation of links to editorial networks and other groups or institutions with similar interests. In these past years, scopio Magazine has been successful in defining itself as an independent publication that has pursued an editorial strategy able to integrate different perspectives about Photography, Architecture and Art coming from its several invited authors, editors and sections within its editorial line. Our identity can be defined as one that is interested in a high level of critical analysis and focus directed to the relations between artistic and documentary photography in regards to its conception as an instrument to question Architecture, City and Territory. In other words, in relation to image and public imaginaries, as well as to the understanding of how different types of images build diverse worlds: between fiction and documentary, reproduction and manipulation, or analogue and digital. Thus, we have implemented further changes as are described in the following paragraphs. To begin with, we draw attention to our editorial platform scopio Network that intertwines research group CCRE-FAUP, scopio Editions and Cityscopio Cultural Association, supporting diverse forums and editorial initiatives, ideas, projects, competitions and workshops related to photography research and editorial agendas. Now, this platform not only divulges scopio Editions Collection but also has an online bookshop with a new scopio eBook collection.
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The further changes made to the organizational structure of scopio Magazine implied creating separate and autonomous volumes based on certain sections of the scopio Magazine, being at the moment the first two: Curator that is Edited by Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro (i2ADS – FBAUP) and Addendum with the title Nynhã Aba, based on the PhD research work of Angela Ferreira, in an artist book format. The following volumes, that we are already announcing here, will be VIEWFINDER and CONTRAST. Both will have a revitalised Editorial board, which means that the coordination of these publications will be shared in between the research group CCRE/CEAU/FAUP and ESMAD/UniMAD/P.PORTO R&Ds. Thus, these next publications will be autonomous even though still connected to scopio Magazine and they will integrate universities and departments related to photography connected to the worlds of Architecture, Art and Image at a national and international level. In doing all this we are offering more autonomy and more space for the editorial content of these prior sections and also building new collaborations giving more freedom and responsibility to their Editors with the objective of creating increased synergies. Published separately, with their own ISSN and in a date of the year that may be different from other scopio magazine publications of the same cycle, with a revitalised Editorial and Advisory Board - CCRE / CEAU / FAUP and ESMAD / UniMAD / P.PORTO R&Ds - and several new Editors, these publications will contribute to raise a wider appreciation of our subject matter, mainly that of Photography related to Architecture and Art. The present cycle of scopio Magazine has been promoting a global critical analysis around the theme of Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, exploring how image is a medium that, on the one hand, can cross boarders and shift boundaries between different subjects and disciplines where photography
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is present in a significant way. On the other hand, how photography has the potential to be used as a critical tool for understanding how architecture is transformed, how it reflects different hybrid cultural identities in many countries, regions or places and how all of this interacts with and affects our cities. In the present edition of scopio Magazine Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries: City the broad perspective and understanding about Photography and Architecture worlds continues and there is an exploration of cities’ Documentary and Artistic Photography. This means, besides other things, exploring the concept of crossing and erecting borders over different fields of study and practices with the intent of presenting a broad understanding about these issues linking them to photography image and City space in order to question our cultures’ values and desires and the specific characteristics of places and buildings. Finally, it is important to refer again that our distribution strategy tries to optimize the presence of scopio Magazine and other scopio Editions publications on dedicated bookshops in Portugal and around the world. We will deal with these bookshops from time to time in order to make scopio as much reachable as possible. SCOPIO Magazine, in its physical format, will also be sold in our online bookshop jointly with other scopio publications as well as the scopio eBook collection, which brings scopio into the digital publishing universe. For now, it can be bought or be found in Europe at bookshops specialized in Photography, Art or in Architecture, City and Territory, such as the AEFAUP bookshop (FAUP), Circo de Ideias and Serralves in Porto, the A+A bookshop and STET - livros & fotografias in Lisbon, the AA Bookshop in London and the RIBA Bookshop in Portland, London, to mention just a few.
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Close-up Susana Ventura is responsible for Close-up, a section that is structured around an interview with a photographer which is always a changing conversation about different ways to look upon reality and space through images. The invited author for this interview is Paulo Catrica, who is a Portuguese photographer. Paulo Catrica's photographs form a nucleus of resistance. In his work, we witness the great themes of classical tradition, such as the landscape and the notion of place, the most refine composition methods, including a careful study of framing and balance of lines, which express his singular style combing with the author’s artistic sensibility and education in History and Arts. And yet, besides this tradition where his work fits, Catrica’s photographs reveal another important feature, if not the most important one, of tracking the subtle, but a far acutely transformations of the everyday world, which obliges us to look deeper and unveil the hidden messages. There is certainly a political expression in Catrica’s photographs that reminds us of the necessity of bringing to the space of the photograph the utmost conditions of the human living. SCOPIO Limited Edition SCOPIO Limited Edition invited the photographer Luis Ferreira Alves to be part of this issue of the scopio Magazine cycle: "Crossing Borders and Shifting Boudaries: City", which accepted to collaborate with one of his photographic works – Edifício Burgo, Porto, 2008 – one of the published photographs in "Photography of the Architecture of Eduardo Souto de Moura" by the author, launched by scopio Editions in June 2016. Through his own sensitivity and expression, Luis Ferreira Alves reveals how the relations between photography and architecture can create synergies, capable of creating a work with a strong authorial brand, and at the same time documenting and understanding the personality of the architect and his architecture. "Edificio Burgo, Porto, 2008" constitutes itself as something more than a document and it is also a creative tool capable of providing alternative narratives of the architectural space, communicating the spirit underlying its creation and ideas of Eduardo Souto de Moura closer to the public.
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Reading Jorge Figueira is an architect an director and assistant Professor of the Department of Architecture of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the University of Coimbra. He was co-commissioner of the Portuguese official representation at the 7th Biennial of Architecture of São Paulo, Brazil. Contributor of the Público newspaper, in the area of architectural criticism, where he signed a biweekly chronicle, between 2012 and 2013. In "Macau: Casinos as Border Spaces" Jorge Figueira approaches the territory of Macau as a space in which game imposes itself as a physically and cultural, territory architecture, where hyper-real experiences are created through themes such as Europe, America and Asia. Everything must be in accordance with the memory that is sought to be implemented in the visitors, appearing the real as a distant echo, through anachronistic and performative references that enter the dimension of the simulacrum and an idea of constant childishness. Visual Chronicle Miguel Leal, a visual artist and researcher based in Porto and Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, is the invited author for this section. Taking as reference the image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field 2014, which recorded for almost 10 years successive exposure resulting from long astronomical observations that set in a precise point of the sky, capturing the emission of light in a broad spectrum. This chronicle “All the time in an image” talks about transformations in the images like representation of the time and the own time transformed by the image. Layers and layers of images that coexist with each other posing the question: What do we see in these images? How do we interrogate them? What in fact do we want to see through them, the beginning of time or a future?
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Contrast The works of the two contemporary artists - Paulina Lara and Eoin Moylan use the medium of photography to explore its representative and aesthetic potential, as well as its relationship with time and space. In The Notion of Home, Paulina Lara proposes an archaeological investigation that starts from construction materials collected and inventoried from the wreckage of demolished houses, an appropriation and recontextualization of the world. Eoin Moylan presents Down in the Valley, an approach on our relationship with time and space through photography, where memories are represented and stories are found - especially when framed in the exhibition space. Both artists explore the idea of the whole and its fragmentation into parts, using photographic documentation as the empowering form to raise these questions. Photographers and Architects The invited author for this section, Angelo Maggi, architect, fulltime associate professor at Università IUAV di Venezia, who develops a work revolved around the study of architectural photography, analysing themes relative to representation understood as a tool of history investigations, presents the essay Re-interpreting Kidder Smith’s Italy Builds: crossovers between photography and architecture. Here he shows a perspective on the wake of the success between architectural photography and personal architecture criticism as a new creative processes wich brought to light new ways of understanding both fields, focusing on George Everard Kidder Smith’s book Italy Builds: Its modern architecture and native inheritance (1955), a collection of astonishing architectural photographs, data and critical comment upon the traditional and modern architecture. The Body in Photography Ren Hang presents Poems, a series of photographs as the reflection of a contemporary posture towards his own generation and the urban culture of China, where he was born. Living and working in Beijing, the young photographer explores the human body and sexuality as an aesthetic proposal. From the sculptural pieces that compose his images, he questions the ethical and moral limits of his own contemporaneity.
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Viewfinder It announces the winner and the honourable mentions of two international contests: scopio International Photography Contest and scopio International Photobook Contest, both directed towards the strengthening of photography as an inquisitive instrument, searching for new talents and awareness towards photography and architecture. SCOPIO INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY CONTEST Crossing borders and shifting boundaries: City, was focused on diverse countries and on how architecture is transformed, how it reflects different hybrid cultural identities in many countries and how all of this interacts with and affects our cities and the landscape, always bearing in mind the mentioned categories: Architecture, City and Territory. The jury conferred awards to the projects “Escape Architecture” (Jürgen Beck, winner) and “New Leipzig” (Silke Koch, mention). SCOPIO INTERNATIONAL PHOTOBOOK CONTEST Crossing borders and shifting boundaries: City, under the same theme as scopio International Photography Contest, was focused on diverse countries and on how architecture is transformed, how it reflects different hybrid cultural identities in many countries and how all of this interacts with and affects our cities and the landscape, always bearing in mind the mentioned categories: Architecture, City and Territory. The jury conferred awards to the projects: STUDIO BREINER HOUSE (Charles Sarrazin, winner). The winner’s work will be published in scopio Photobook collection and the organisation has selected a set of self-published dummies to be part of the CITYZINES showcase in scopio Network.
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Flash This cultural agenda intends to advertise a series of significant events related to photography that will take place in the city, in the country or at international level. In this issue, we announce the exhibition Genesis by Sebastião Salgado, displayed at Cordoaria Nacional in Lisbon until August 2, 2015. This selection leads viewers through an eight-year journey along more than 30 countries, looking for unexplored places without the influence of modern civilisation. We also present Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980, an exhibition showing an overview of the multiple positions, debates and creation about architecture, between 1955 and 1980. The exhibition will take place at MoMA, New York, from March 29 untill July 19, 2015. Paths José Maças de Carvalho is the invited author for this section, a well known Portuguese photographer and artist whose work has been published internationally and is present in several major individual exhibitions and other significant initiatives related with the field of Art and Photography. This project Ensaio para Atlas #1 (1988_2016) is very based on his photographic archive work having in mind, as the the author has explained in various occasions, Aby Warburg’s “Mnemosyne”project”. This means, besides other things, allowing images to activate new meanings when side-by-side to other images and his work confronts us with the dilemma, as Pedro Pousada writes in his essay about José Maças de Carvalho work ”( ….) we want images as storytelling, as truth and falsehood, as mutation and crystalization, we want them to give us the unseen, the void within excess, the absent. We want them as devices that bring us the “what if” of our body, sensorial experience. But they cannot.”
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Colophon
Publisher Cityscópio – Associação Cultural Rua da Cidreira 291, 4465-076 Porto (Matosinhos), Portugal info@cityscopio.com www.cityscopio.com
Editorial and Advisory Board CCRE – Centro de Comunicação e Representação Espacial Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto Via Panorâmica S/N, 4150-755 Porto, Portugal ccre.arq.up@gmail.com tel: +351 226057100 fax: +351 226057199
Editorial Coordinator Pedro Leão Neto pedro.neto@cityscopio.com pneto@arq.up.pt +351 964040521
Collaborators Jiôn Kiim jionkiim@cityscopio.com Sandra Teixeira sandrateixeira@cityscopio.com
Creative Director Né Santelmo ne.santelmo@cityscopio.com
International Photography Contest Jury
Translation Lisbeth Ferreira
Ângela Ferreira, Dieter Neubert, Moritz Neumüller, Pedro Leão Neto, Walter Costa
Printing
International Photobook Contest Jury
Periodicity/Circulation
Ângela Ferreira, Dieter Neubert, Moritz Neumüller, Pedro Leão Neto, Walter Costa
Editors Ângela Ferreira Gabriela Vaz Pinheiro Susana Ventura
Invited Authors Andreia Alves Angelo Maggi Eoin Moylan Jion Kiim Jorge Figueira José Maçãs de Carvalho Luis Ferreira Alves Miguel Leal Paulina Lara Paulo Catrica Pedro Pousada Ren Hang Sandra Teixeira
Printy Annual
scopio magazine also thanks and acknowledges all the support it has received from FCT, UP, FAUP, CEAU, CCRE
Covers Paulo Catrica (Face I) José Maçãs de Carvalho (Face II)
Advisory Board Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro inãki bergera Marco Iuliano Olívia Da Silva Susana Ventura
ISSN 1647-8266 (printed version) ISSN 1647-8274 (online version) Dep. Legal Nº 316944/10 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means or stored in any information storage or retrieval system without the editor’s written permission. All photographs featured in scopio Magazine are © of the photographers.
Cofinanciado por:
index
Close-up – Paulo Catrica
Viewfinder
Close-up by Susana Ventura
SCOPIO International Photography Contest
The need of informal: interview with Paulo Catrica
1st Prize Jürgen Beck
14 Limited Edition – Luis Ferreira alves Edifício Burgo, Porto, 2008
34 Reading – Jorge Figueira Macau: Casinos as Border Spaces
Honourable Mentions Silke Koch David Kendall SCOPIO International Photobook Contest 1st Prize Charles Sarrazin
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36 Flash Visual Chronicle – Miguel Leal
by Andreia Alves de Oliveira
All the time in an image
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42 X-Ray Contrast – Paulina Lara and Eoin Moylan
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Contrast by Moritz Neumüller The Notion of Home_2016
Next editions
Down in the Valley_2016
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46 Paths –José Maçãs de Carvalho Photographers and architects – Angelo Maggi Re-interpreting Kidder Smith’s Italy Builds: crossovers between photography and architecture
62 The Body in Photography– Ângela Ferreira Poems by Ren Hang
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Ensaio para Atlas #1 (1988_2016)_ The unconscious rhythms of reality or how images will never give us back what we never had by Pedro Pousada
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The need of informal: interview with Paulo Catrica Close-up by Susana Ventura Introduction
and where together with the criti-cal context. In London, first at the Goldsmith’s College and then at the University of Westminster, teachers, technicians and equipment, well-equipped data centres, incredible libraries, conferences… all this environ-ment changed the way I think and photograph. I could hardly get this resources in Portugal. Then, the fact that we feel very small in a huge place, the challenge of relating to a place that is much bigger than we can image, also inevitably contaminates you.
On the training
SUSANA VENTURA: This is the first time that in this section, “Close-up”, we have an interview with a Portuguese photographer. However, you did part of your training in London, at the Goldsmiths’s College and at Westminster (MA in Image and Communication, Goldsmith’s College and PhD, School of Art and Media, University of Westminster). This leads us to two questions: There is a pre-conceived idea that artists develop, mainly, a practical activity. Thus, I must ask you the reasons behind your decision of getting involved in a research project of theoretical nature and how did this influence, and has been influencing, your practical work? What were you searching when you decided to make that training in the United Kingdom? I guess that kind of experience changes the way we look, think and do?
The academic life and the teaching, not necessarily with the purpose of getting a degree, even tough that is also important, have also enabled me to surpass some difficulties, in particular the relation between writing and photographing. Moments that have very different physical and intellectual terms/ circumstances, consid-ering that all practice is also theory and all theory implicates a practice. SV: For instance, your project on the New Towns would be completely different if it did not have a theoretical basis behind? It was produced and carried out during the time you were at the United Kingdom: you were already there and you already understood how those
PAULO CATRICA: I felt the needed to think about my practical work from an academic point of view, the school and the university, as the place where the equipment and the resources to research
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cities influenced daily life itself. It is interesting to understand all these connections between theory and the history of architecture.
between 1947 and the 80’. In the fifties, the cities were built in the midst of the economi-cal crisis, the outcome of war was felt, for instance, in the limited access to building materials. How was it possible to think about drawing garden-cities and implementing Welfare State in a scene of devastation and economic crises. And, nowadays, there is this huge difficulty in fighting the global economy determinism? The utopian gesture of the programme it was outstanding. I believe we still need utopias, we need to re-introduce ideas that make the future possible. Surely not by copying models.
PC: The PHD enabled me to consistently study the History and the Critical Theory of Photography, and the History of Architecture and its relation to photography. Never had the History degree been so useful. In a certain way, History was as a skeleton behind a closet. It has always worked as a research methodology, noticeable, for example, at "Liceus", the secondary schools’ projects, though not so noticeable in other works. At the PHD research, “History” became part of the thing, particularly when studying the historical context that promoted the appearance of New Towns as a programme, how photographs contributed to this context and, then, how, throughout time, photographs represented ways of thinking and making architecture. One of the most important aspect of the research was the possibility of studying the New Town’s photographs of the Architectural Review archive, at the RIBA library (Royal Institute of British Architects). Robert Elwall, by the time photography curator of RIBA, that unfortunately has died in 2012, support the investigation and made possible to access the Press Group Photographs even before they had been treated and catalogued. I am eter-nally grateful to him. It is very interesting and challenging to look at photographs of those places in different historical moments,
Part I On the photographer work as an author SV: Despite the interrelation between them in your work, I would like to separate them in two strands. On the one hand, your work as an artist and as an author of a photographic work that, as you say, is integrated in a documental lineage. And, on the other hand, the strand which has been designated as architecture photography (and I am interested in debating this category in the second part of the interview), that is more immediately connected to two of your favourite subjects (which are interdependent): landscape and the idea of place.
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Still following the previous questions, we go back to your History education that, definitely, influences the subjects you chose to photograph and that can, thus, lead us to think about an idea of documental photog-raphy and, very obvious in your work, the construction of a collective memory, making it also necessary to recover some influences, certainly, from history itself. How can we formulate an idea of documental photog-raphy after your work?
I was delighted when part of this project was included in collective exhibitions in the United Kingdom. The idea of dealing with dormant or less relevant subjects is motivating.. SV: It is curious that you talk about that, I was thinking that maybe you understand photography as a creation of an autonomous space, that is not mere illustration and that, consequently, enables human creation regarding visual, as you name it, with great freedom. But there is an implicit power that photographs have of revealing and creating recognised links, that work in your photographs through that symbolic and allegoric aspect. Which are those aspects or those connections that you want to be discovered or revealed? Are they merely visible, or are there other underlying subjects that you would like to explore?
PC: There is a specific relation between History and my photographs, or to put it better, I always research on what I am looking at, investigate both the historical context and the ideological background that has caused it, no matter if it is a secondary school, a library, a city, or a landscape... History – or the methodology that I have learnt in the History degree – always helped me to make decisions and choices, with a decisive influence on the way I sequence the photographs or the issues within the subject. In fact, there is a documental matrix that can be more or less hidden, more or less evident. I understand that the practice of photography leads me to think about things and then, eventually, it leads the spectators to feel the same. That is to say, I am not driven by a formal question. Photographs should lead us to see, to think and imagine things. For instance, the New Towns as a subject are slightly ignored by the histography of English architecture, and
PC: There is that expectation about photographs that they are literal, because they represent things and subjects, I am referring to photographs that try to be documental. They are related to the world and us, spectators, we refer and position what we see in photographs with reference to what we know of the world. I believe that nowadays, symbolic and allegoric aspects are overlapped, and there is the possibility of forming or informing photographs. Thus,
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it is the sequence that builds the narrative and this in turn grows from the relations between the different photographs, the title, the subtitles (or not), the technical data, the format, the exhibition or editing context, etc. Some photographs stand out of the sequence, while others have a narrative role, they report to the whole. The hypothesis become more complex and stimulating because photographs are transversal to several aspects of our daily life, to our identity card, to the advertising outdoors or at the museum. It is not enough that they look like documents; the method and the research process must be revealed and must be part of the whole. Sometimes the documental aspects are included in the title or subti-tle, other than in the image itself.
bankrupt, because geographically they were associated to industrial projects that became obsolete. Everything is registered in the landscape as an archaeological stratigraphy of our collective memory. SV: The allegorical aspects of your photographs are also some sort of vehicle for the construction of that collective memory, which is very clear, for example, in the theatres series. It is the allegorical aspects that allows the spectator to think about the importance of that space, how it has worked and how it has become part of a collective memory. Allegory has a hidden side, it is not the evident vision, there is a decomposition. PC: Space and time seem to be the aspects that are best treated by photography. Our imagination does the rest. The photographs of the empty dressing room of the maestro or a classroom without students and without teacher are unique - and decisive - moments when the photographer has the privilege of testing and projecting other meaning and imaginary for that place. It is the spectator that fills it and that may or may not give it importance. In fact, I have been working hard on institutional spaces, schools, theatres, libraries (I took part in huge reading project), museums, where many of those spaces
SV: : In the case of New Towns, we can talk about the connection to utopia, for example? PC: Yes, the drive to the New Towns was their utopian facet as part of the Welfare State. Looking and pho-tographing its architecture and social landscape, the public space, etc. Here, landscape is so approached and handled, so ideological, that it refers to political, cultural, social and economical aspects. In the New Towns, it is possible to understand how some of them survived better, why they stayed closer to big cities or why others went
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PaulO CATRICA L1015560 Dunkerque, 13.06. 2014
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were or had been in transition in terms of the function we use them for or in terms of how they were used. In the case of Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, it was the new model of production of Opera shows, in which European theatres work in a network, which leads to the fact that many of those spaces became obsolete. It is no longer necessary to create and store the costumes and scenarios in the theatre building, one part is rented in France or Italy while the other is in transit. But theatres are quite easy to photograph because they are absolutely scenic or refer to that side.
no longer strange to us (also emphasised by your intention of showing an everyday use of the landscape or of spaces), but that in your photographs have an increased enchantment. We can talk about a hidden power of daily life, that in your photographs are definitely part of the expressive components of photographs, of the framework, of the perspective, of the proportion, of the colours? PC: Since the post-war, the idea of daily life has had a strong expression in literature, cinema and photography. Maybe it is the idea of connecting art to life, as a political gesture. The ideas of use and daily life are very important for my photographs. But if we think, photography is a common form of expression that, nowadays, comes and fills part of the triviality of our daily life. It is - as Fontcuberta says - pretty much the same that happens with slang conversation, it replaces the written and spoken language. It is a fact that we can chose if we want to read a common newspaper or Rentes de Carvalho, two different supports and two ways of reading where only one of them is in fact literature. In my case I create the photographs also to relate myself to things and to the world. The process isn’t always peaceful, I prefer to see daily life and triviality from a certain distance and from a scale that guides my relation with objects, with landscapes and, sometimes, with people.
SV: But you often show the hidden side of theatre. PC: Indeed, I really like to show the accountant’s office with plastic plants, the director’s table or the seamstresses office, the most regular working places that make things work and that never get applauses. The triviality and the intimacy behind every scenery. I am conscious that photographs aestheticize the subjects and that are, often, much better than the thing itself, than what really exists. And this is dangerous and fascinating. SV: I particularly like your idea of common spectator, that justifies the fact that you don’t use great perspectives and which, for me, represents a reduction of the distance, bringing us closer to the photograph, that is
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PaulO CATRICA Lfc 666 Halton Lea Shopping Center, Runcorn, 20.11.2007, 15:47 h
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photograph. It is easier in formal terms and more demanding in terms of expectations. In many of these cases, the relation with the surrounding landscape is already thought and solved by the architect.
Part II On the photographic work as an architecture essay (in the sense of research) SV: In your work, there is an idea of a very strong place and of a landscape which, in my opinion, has been transforming, even if slowly, the relation of architects with photography, and being represented in your work as a growing (I think) order of this architecture photograph where the subject is no longer the building with anonymous and manual construction (as in the Galapagos or Madeira Islands) and becomes the building designed by architects, such as Sami or Olgiati. I would like to debate a series of resulting paradoxes and con-tradictions because inevitably your style is present in both works, which presupposes a series of constant visu-al values and leads us to ask: what changes or what bonds these two universes, enabling us, architects, considering a landscape as that of the Galápagos, to find ideas that we consider interesting or values that we can learn?
Maybe I think some photographs from the landscape and the materials and others from the ideas that archi-tects transmit. I must confess I really like to be guided by architects in their works. When I visited E/C’s house, that the SAMI architects have designed at Pico, in the Azores, I spent the first two days photographing and talking to Miguel about the problems that he and Inês had to solve, on how they thought about the materials, the order and the programme, how they related to the client, who were the persons that built it, the origin of the woods, how they worked some details… I am really interested about that side of the author architecture, even tough I am aware that these houses are designed for people that have some or a lot of money and in this regard, there is, in a way, some kind of counter-cycle with my New Towns. But I look at these objects as unusual and unique gestures, almost unique and rare hypothesis of thinking architecture, that sometime archi-tects do not have.
PC: That question is very interesting, I will try to be totally honest, but I am not sure if I can. I think about all the photographs in the same way. However, when I am photographing architecture with author - recognised as architect - I know there are many aspects of the image that already existed before the
I also consider the other landscapes, such as the Galápagos, as architecture and landscape and I try to think about what
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was behind that gesture, since, even in the most difficult situations, building a house is not only pragmatism. Even when someone tries to build with limited resources, he tries to draw and combine materials and always tries an aesthetic gesture. That part is very interesting and important for my work.
SV: My question now is, precisely, in the context of the definition of architecture photography itself as a category. Not only because architecture and landscape are subjects of your work as an artist. There are the examples in which you photograph an architecture work, based on an order from an architect, where there is that question that you have just referred of being an already addressed object, with filters and prior mediation (because architecture is also mediation). I would like you to talk a little about what is architecture photography for you and I was thinking about one of your recent works, for Gonçalo Byrne in which there wasn’t relevant explanations regarding this project and, however, your photographs give expression to the ideas that were at the genesis of the project and escape from its formalisation. I specially remember that gorgeous photograph of the side street at nightfall, that just by that small part places us at the historical centre, between narrow streets, in another city, in any other Italian city, with a different idea of wandering... In fact, in that small fragment, you managed to give expression to one of Gonçalo’s ideas without any previous explanation.
But both are, nowadays, archetypes. It is difficult to counteract images that you have already seen, that you have done and that you already know how they will work. For instance, in the case of the photographs of Valerio Olgiati’s house, the time we spent talking - and there was not much time to photograph - drove many of my photographs. The light inside the house, when going through the corridor, disappeared and it increased the idea of private space and of reclusion: an almost monastic idea. SV: Yes, it also has a very monastic aspect due to the cloister. PC: Valerio Olgiati has mentioned this monastic aspect, a house that can be opened to the landscape or closed only having the sky, as a shoebox. A concrete cloister with a spring/lake/ pool in marble from Estremoz, surrounded by plants from all around the world, a cloistergarden which is the heart of the house and that has a rare photogeny. I hope photographs transmit that atmosphere.
P C: Those words are very kind, your understanding or Gonçalo’s understanding about photographs or Miguel and Inês’ understanding, Valerio’s, etc., it is very important for me. In fact, photographs
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manage to condense some of the ideas of the architectural project, they operate as a synthesis, as a summary.
It is a very modernist, pictorial and formalist gesture, almost like in the twenties of the previous century, the idea of deconstructing the object and suggesting a clean and sanitized world.
In Leiria, photography reveals a double game, a reflection that the building provides of the landscape. In this case, the building is very badly treated, almost abandoned. This abandonment process seemed very interesting to me as a visual hypothesis, in which the building that Gonçalo Byrne has drawn and built a few years ago, is attributed to the main contractor. It is very interesting for me: how does architecture resists and survives to the given uses and functions.
SV: Another aspect that I think is essential in your work is that it shows us, architects, how the photographic work can be, on its own, an architecture essay. In a certain way, you fulfil Pedro Bandeira’s wish in preparing a Doctoral thesis on photography only with photography. Using mainly a method on photography, the use of the idea of series, you often build an architecture research. I remember a work from Veneza with the Sami, or Inês Lobo’s works. Your photographs research, deepen, often reveal different aspects of the same subject, showing us different hypothesis, at other times it show us what you call visual archaeology, but that it is not only visual, it is about human occupation… I think it is the main synthesis of your work and it merges all its characteristics, it preserves the autonomy of the visual, plastic and artistic work, it adds value and creates new architecture knowledge, it divides itself in other works, enabling other new ones - in the case of Sami, for example, the final project is undoubtedly influenced by your pioneering work. Is it something that results from your experience, is it a desire or a method?
I think that architecture photography as a genre is in a renewal process, that can be positive, with the wear and exhaustion associated to hygienic photographs that create an idealized world where buildings float be-tween the sky and any other space. Moreover, when viewed from above with the support of drones buildings are part of a world that does not exist, that it is not possible to try as a spectator or an inhabitant of that building. I think it was Corbusier’s dream, photographs show the physical existence of the architectural object, at the same time it gets increasingly closer of drawings and models.
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PaulO CATRICA Mfc 290.6 from Halton Castle, towards North, Runcorn, 21.11.2007, 10:42h
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SV: That is precisely why I think you create a bridge with the traditional architecture photography category. First, an order is not only an order, it is complicity. There is a relation of efforts, of contamination, both from the architecture work in your work and of your work in the architecture work. Moreover, you do something incredible that results from your method of researching and deepening, of seeing things by posing problems that, often, even architects do not pose.
PC: My experience as a photographer was influenced by people that helped me to see and think architecture from a different point (of view). Like you, for example, architects that do not build, that think and write, other examples such as Pedro Bandeira, Joaquim Moreno or Cláudia Taborda. I really appreciate the fact that my work is contaminated by many different ideas and that lead me to think as a photographer or as I show in the photographs. I have an immense fascination for Architecture as a vehicle of ideas, the way it enables us to feel the past or how it enlightens the present. It is extremely hard to be an architect.
PC: When I travelled to France to photograph the works of Lacaton & Vassal with Pedro Bandeira, during the day we were not together. Each one set its course. Then, by night, when we were having dinner we had seen completely different things. Pedro brought my attention to some things and I would often write them down so as not to forget; and I shared other things. That work resulted from many conversations and, I am sure, created affinity between us.
And architects who think were certainly the first to consider my work’s hypothesis. Then the architects that architect, recently Gonçalo Byrne, Inês Lobo or the SAMI; they are permanent challenges to that wish and method you were talking about. I also have to refer the importance of Gabriele Basilico, who I miss a lot, who taught me to relate to all the things that surround architecture and landscape, small and large, as if they were all important and decisive.
Many years ago, an older architect used to tell me: “There is a correct point of view for photographs to look at a certain architectural object”. I always answered that there are several points of views and that they are never the correct ones. They should suggest and build new plans to understand the object or the landscape, or as one relates to the other.
I am interested in the fact that a series of photographs tries to create a critical, imaginary, poetical understanding, or any other, about architecture, landscape or a place. That is why I face my cooperation with archi-tects the same way I draw a portfolio, an exhibition or a book: as a visual test.
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SV: Right, it is the autonomous object, once again. It is self-referential from a point. It is like the idea of the Renaissance perspective.
not fulfil its function which is - as Lacaton & Vassal say - a freedom platform, where a thousand and one narratives and a thousand and one hypothesis are possible. One of the questions that I once asked Jean Philippe was how he dealt with the permanent transformation of Palais de Tokyo, where there is little or nothing of the original project. But their great decision is there forever and ever and that changes even the idea of the museum itself (with white walls). They burst everything! He deals very well with this permanent transformation and, for many years, he collected pictures from several exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, precisely with the idea of understanding the thousand and one appropriations of spaces, that were only possible because they created an informal space from the point of view of the base and that everyone can use, make his own and change it radically.
PC: Yes, the idea of photographs representing architecture is sad, simpleton and reducing. When I photographed Valerio Olgiati’s house, while we were talking he told me that one of the worst aspects of contemporary architecture is that the narration is too obvious, it is based in already defined and formal mimetic codes. “I have built a house that is for nobody else except for me, it is a radical architecture experience that is not clear at all”. And its true, nothing in that house is obvious. When you have the opportunity of listening to the work’s architect, photographs get a new depth, a new reflective and descriptive capacity. You abandon the obvious and look closer to the particular and to the detail. SV: I think there is a very important aspect in architecture photography, when the architect thinks that a specific photograph must illustrate his idea.
PC: At the Dunkerque Museum and at the Nantes Architecture School we feel that idea of public space and appropriation. It is a great moment when architecture moves you, physically. Drawing the space without im-posing discipline or imposing only one function is a great gesture. What fascinates me in the works of Lacaton & Vassal is the gap between the pragmatism of materials
PC: For this purpose, the architect must make a draw, photographs are a different matter... SV: Exactly! And it couldn’t simply be an illustration, because this way you are not creating anything new, you do not add value. If a photograph does not surpass the limits of architecture itself, then, architecture does
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its expression aes-thetical qualities of the technique and of the method)
and the hypothesis of never abandoning the architec-ture drawing. Certainly, there, it is possible to find many ideas that I appreciate and that I value in terms of architecture and of public space. I mean ethical and political questions. As an interval between necessity and self-construction architecture and the art and the design of architects. In Lacaton & Vassal’s works we can find all the architectures and the proof is how people take ownership and use space, whether in the new balconies of modernist social housing buildings of the post-war or in the graffities in the walls of the Nantes School.
SV: We are reaching the last question. I would like to talk to you about something that has, up until recently (I think the battle is solved) been the great doubt between the analogue and the digital. Maybe we can talk a little about the advantages and the disadvantages but, mainly, I would like to know what your option provides to the expression of your work, because there is an expressive quality associated to each technique and your option is certainly related to that one or to others. PC: The analogue isn’t an industrial technology anymore, which leads to some operational problems, additional costs, additional time, etc. It is like handmaking boots. You need to have your own material suppliers, you can no longer enter a shop to buy a film. First of all, for me, it is a question of methodology. When I work with analogue I take few photographs, I edit the work while I photograph. I use a wide or medium format camera that I place in a tripod and everything is more paused and reflected. I prepare a portfolio with 12 or 15 photographs that are chosen out of a total of 40 or 50. That is why, each photograph includes an a priori idea and the edition involves relative choices. When I use digital,
SV: The so-called modern architecture has an end that has long been announced, even from the material point of view (it gets old badly and too quickly) and then you have to rethink architecture, often coming back, examining. PC: It is crucial to the criticism of the contemporary to revisit and think about some of the ideological and pragmatic questions of architecture and art of the Post-War, since the 50’. Even to give us back a utopic ma-trix... How to think that we cannot abandon the politics of this life Trumps. Part III On the instruments and process (in the sense that the work results from these, brings in
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PaulO CATRICA Mfc 199.1 Teatro Nacional deS.Carlos, 2.8.2005 16:43 h
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I chose from hundreds of photographs. One pho-tograph can have ten multiples and four versions and I spend hours, days, weeks in front of the screen. As I am already ancient, I have difficulty in changing, we are born and die analogue. I understand and accept all the technological developments and I consider them stimulating and interesting. In this case the problem lies in the process and methods: mines.
SV: With the digital, the critical decision is subsequent. PC: Yes, you edit and then you choose. Technology pushes you to do that. Everything seems to be at zero; each file seems to have infinite editing options. With the analogue, I control technology, while with the digital I feel uncomfortable and lazy. I do not have any nostalgic attitude, I only need to convince my interlocutors that these tools are a necessary thing for me.
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PaulO CATRICA Mfc522.10 Casa E/C, S.Roque do Pico, 23.11.2014 18:45h
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PaulO CATRICA Mfc559.6 Villa Além, 24.05.2016 18:20h
LIMITED EDITION LUIS FERREIRA ALves
Edíficio Burgo
TITLE: Edíficio Burgo ARTIST: Luis Ferreira Alves YEAR: 2008 EDITION: (Certificate hand-signed by the author) scopio Limited Edition PROCESS: Inkjet print HOW TO BUY IT: info@cityscopio.com
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READING JORGE FIGUEIRA
Macau: Casinos as Border Spaces Macau is a border space whose different configurations over time reinforce the documental importance of the photographic and cartographic register. There is something spectral about Macau; the memory is erased and reassessed in each moment; history is always present even when the physical registers are disappearing. There is also a permanent border in movement between the increasingly phantasmagorical presence of history in its different manifestations and the turmoil of a present accelerated with casinos and mass tourism. This last stage of Macau - in which game imposes itself as a physical and cultural, territory architecture - also represents a border space between American and Asian culture, between Stanley Ho’s monopoly during the Portuguese administration and the dazzling liberalisation of post-handover from 1999. Since then, a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, Macau has historically grew through the overlap and adaption of the Portuguese city model, present in Praia Grande and the one from the Chinese city, at the Porto Interior area. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the successive reconfigurations of Macau result from successive landfill sites, which are well-documented. The growth process happens in an atmosphere of contemplation and co-habitation between Portuguese and Chinese. Then, there is also an invisible border that has assumed several forms over time. But the contemporary condition of Macau enables new and stimulating readings. The understanding of Macau as a border space is also reflected in “Macau Residents as Border People” by Werner Breitung and “Macau, Cross-border City” by Christopher C. M. Lee. If, in a mythical point of view, Macau is traditionally understood as a border between the east and the west, these studies focus on a tangible and statistic plan of the borders that the territory ancestrally defines as the “mainland China” and the question of the associated identity “crisis”. In “Macau Residents as Border People – A Changing Border Regime from a Sociocultural Perspective” (2009), Macau is analysed as a case study with a dense and growing border activity that is inherent to the territory identity. An exhaustive and imaginative report published by
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José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (Lisboa and Wynn), Macau, 2008
READING JORGE FIGUEIRA
Harvard GSD AECOM Project on China, edited by Christopher C. M. Lee, “Macau, Cross-Border City” develops the subject and provides a project dimension to this subject. According to Lee, “Macau is a paradigmatic example of a cross-border city. Although it is indeed unique, a former Portuguese colonial city in the southern tip of China, it shares characteristics of cross-border cities elsewhere. The cross-border city is an example of architecture as a common framework for the city, precisely because the border is not merely something that separates but also something that accommodates: these borders absorb, thicken, feather, and broaden in different parts of the city” (Lee, 2014, x). This border identity gets a new and complex dimension when we analyse the overwhelming presence of casinos and entertainment structures whose presence is growing in the peninsula and that resulted in Cotai Strip. In these enormous structures, the game is the hard core but as “Integrated Resorts”, casinos are devices with great programmatic and symbolic complexity, with several different types of offers. It is known that the overcoming of the “decorated sheds” that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brow have found in Las Vegas, by the end of the 60s, is made on the inauguration of the Mirage, by Steve Wynn, in 1989 (Niglio, 2009, 86). The progress to the “Integrated Resort” concept has been fulfilled with the Venetian de Las Vegas (Niglio, 2009, 87), introducing the MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, Exhibitions) logic, in 1999. Casinos are manifestations of several types of borders: they open, limit, hide and give again. The first function of a casino is to delimit the territory as an announcement of itself. It is not iconographic architecture due to the architecture’s need for protagonism, but due to the need for commercial assertion. Everything must be “iconographic” in a casino, such as creating feelings, memories, echoes. The aim is to be increasingly bigger, better, more extraordinary than the surroundings. When lifting, it aims to eliminate what lays behind the possible context. At most, it also aims to delete the previous life of users, injecting new memories. The casino is border and space, limit and container, bright door and living room, dark room and back door. At Cotai, the small village of Taipa is enlightened by the overwhelming presence of Galaxy Macau; the small Escola Portuguesa is overshadowed by Grand Lisboa. The interaction of casinos with the existing city is abrupt and violent. The liberalisation of gambling questions the delicate balance of Macau, at the same time, it multiplied its global visibility and economical viability. As if after
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decades of exploitation of a simple sacred well - the Casino Lisboa (1970) – oil jetted from everywhere. The “Fortune Diamond” that repeatedly raises from the floor at the Galaxy, with millions of lights and colours, is probably a celebration of this phenomenon. It is interesting to see this accelerated way of Macau, from the last fifteen years, with theorisations of postmodernism in the 80s. Here pop culture gains a new speciality; architecture is in a state of delirium that intersects the entertainment logic with artistic experiences from the 20th century, such as surrealism; the flow of people and money takes us to the other side of the so-called “decadence of Europe”. In Simulacra and Simulation (1981), Jean Baudrillard writes that simulation “is the generation by models of real without origin nor reality: hyper-real”. And even: “It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map” (Baudrillard, 1991, 8). Before being a map, the Cotai Strip, set in the landfill between the Coloane and Tapia islands, is a territory, a “no man's land” colonised by hyper-real applications: giant “simulacra” of the European cultural (the Venetian), the Asian culture (the Galaxy) and the American culture (the City of Dreams). The subjects are fixed as hyper-real experiences, where everything must be in accordance with the memory that is sought to be implemented in the visitors. A somnambulistic walking. The strategy of never leaving, as in a nightmare. The real seems a distant echo, increasingly distant, distorted, multiplied, miniaturised. Thus, it makes sense that at the entrance of MGM Grand Macau there is a sculpture by Salvador Dalí and that the inauguration of the casino, in 2007, integrated an exhibition with his artwork. After all, American-inspired casinos are conceptually melted clocks; and Asians seem to result from an automatic writing of cryptic sense for us, Europeans. The more fantastic the decor, higher the revenue, as in children's or Hollywood super-heroes' films. The “suspension of disbelief” that occurs in literature, circus or cinema, here finds its architectural moment. The revenue from casinos is like the gate receipts from Hollywood films, consequence of the “star quality” of space, special effects and the highest possible degree of implausibility. Architecture integrates elements from architectural culture from the modernist open space to post-modernist fake operations or to the random chic of desconstructivism. But the
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READING JORGE FIGUEIRA
superstition, the visuality and the Chinese traditions are as important as any other western literary manifestation. The damage control, recycling and the permanent monitoring are subjects that provide an in-progress character to architecture. From this point of view, American-inspired casinos have a shorter adaptability: Venice is always Venice, at the Venetian; bur MGM Grand seasonally creates premises that change the interpretation of Lisbon replicas from the atrium. The City of Dreams with its almost rustic American subject – the Hard Rock Cafe, the Hard Rock Hotel – it seems the most anachronistic and 19th-century style casino. The permanently evening-blue of Venice channels is more performative than the minimalism of true electric guitar boxes from the Hard Rock Cafe. It is a case where history is more pop than pop culture itself. At the most radical casinos there is not a real distinction between space and decoration and when that happens - as in the StarWorld Macau, opened in 2006 - there is a feeling of a certain failure. Everything should suggest a narrative, monitoring the loneliness of the player and his, eventual, corresponding families. Casinos are “social condensers” not in the sense of communism as it was instructed by its constructivist genesis, but in the sense of the effervescent capitalism in China. They are community premises of millions of Chinese families that have the experience of “Venice” from the endless shoppings, to flying diamonds. In relation to Disneyland, Baudrillard has written: “This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness” (Baudrillard, 1991, 21). The “childishness is everywhere”, it is in Macau, as the renminbi in place of Disney characters. From the cenographic point of view, casinos from Macau set successive borders between the low tech past and the most performative and high-tech forms from the present. The progress can be summarised in the comparison of the painted caravels in the ceiling of the Casino Lisboa atrium and the multimedia show at one of the entrances of Wynn Macau, which displays a “Tree of Prosperity” and a “Dragon of Fortune” coming from a crater, at every 30 minutes. From Sistine paintings to this high-tech events, there is a trace of time but also the visuality of the bright material progress in China.
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The economic and technological advance of casinos is more related to the “post” universe than to "modernity” and more to dystopia than to utopia, even if they result from resolutions from the Chinese Communist Party, within the People's Republic of China. Paradoxically, “Maoism” was the last greatest Chinese import. Will post-modern China be able to create a new global brand? The democratisation of luxury, a hedonism even if monitored and the success of cosmetics lead to the subject that pop culture has embraced as “post-modern” and that is here experienced and not only theorised. If the West consumerism is identified as a “crisis of values”, here it can be seen as an eventual expression of the individual. If “iconographic architecture” in the West is considered a reflection of a decaying system, here it is a means of formalising contents that are eventually related to identity. Looking back to the “retromania” underway in the West, it has an essentially nostalgic component and reveals insecurity in terms of future. Here, the voracious and elastic use of references from the 20th century is used precisely at the originally expendable way of pop culture. At the West, pop culture was institutionalised, here it sped up towards emptiness, parody and the ephemeral at its matrix. “The style is the substance” has always been a pop primacy that here has found a new sense. The meeting of pop culture with Chinese culture was already foreseen in Andy Warhol's Mao portraits. They are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Casinos are the place of that border transformed into a space. Multimillionaires and workers, whole families and lone wolfs who can here be found in different corridors. But it is also time that is here encapsulated: the explosion of American capitalism in the 20th century, growing into the 21st century of Chinese capitalism. At the casinos, we are somewhere between America and China, at the new border destination of Macau. Bibliography: Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacros e simulação, Lisbon: Relógio d’Água, 1991 [1981] Breitung, Werner, “Macau Residents as Border People: A Changing Border Regime From a Sociocultural Perspective”, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, Vol. 38, 1, Hamburg, 2009. Lee, Christopher C. M. (ed.), Common Frameworks: Rethinking the Developmental City in China Part 2, Macau, Cross-border City, Cambridge: Harvard GSD AECOM Project on China: Department of Urban Planning and Design, 2014. Niglio, Nichols J., “A conversation on casino architecture in Las Vegas and Macao”, in Thomas Chung, Hendrik Tieben (ed.), “Macao: architecture and urbanism in the first post-handover decade 1999-2009”, World Architecture, 12/2009.
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VISUAL CHRONICLE MIGUEL LEAL
All the time in an image One possible image for time is that of an open tap through which water flows and swirls down the drain, in an unstoppable hypnotic whirlpool. We tend to confuse that movement, that flowing whirlpool, with time itself. However, as St. Augustine has taught us in his Confessions, movement is not time, it is only one of its expressions. Thus, the expression of time is cinematic, as a present that comes and soon leaves: a past present, a present from things from the present and a future present, of what is yet to come. I have recently found an image that is not just a representation of time. Up to a certain point it is time itself converted into an image. I am referring to a photograph taken with the Hubble Space Telescope— Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 — and that results from the combination of several images used in successive exhibitions, throughout nearly 10 years, from 2003 to 2012. These deep fields result from long astronomical observations that focus a specific spot in the sky, catching light emissions in a broad spectrum. These images, that were taken with the aim of detecting more distant galaxies, provide valuable information on the most primitive stages of the Universe. In this case, a small section of the Formax constellation in the South Hemisphere was chosen precisely because it has no stars with relevant brightness that could overshadow the observation. Astronomers have combined the total spectrum of colours to which Hubble is sensitive, from ultraviolet almost to infrareds. Thus, Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 is the result of the accumulation of light that has reached from that point in the sky over 841 orbits of the telescope. In this tiny piece of the sky, which corresponds to a square of 1 per 1 mm seen from a 1 meter distance, it was possible to spot 10.000 galaxies with different shapes and sizes. Some of those galaxies are 13 billion light-years away, that is to say, a few hundreds of millions light-years from the beginning of time, since it is estimated that the Universe has 13.7 billion light-years of existence. The differences of colour and luminous intensity captured by the highly sensitive cameras of the Bubble telescope, are, thus, a result from
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Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014 Credits: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI)
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VISUAL CHRONICLE MIGUEL LEAL
the different distances of the galaxies. This hypersensitivity is also superhuman and one of the possible expressions of the hidden iceberg of a certain unconsciousness, which is revealed by all the optical machines that turn the invisible into the visible, from the infinitely far away to the infinitely small, from the small instance to the longest duration. This image is the longer and denser photographic exhibition that I have ever known. It has been intermittently conducted over almost 10 years, orbit after orbit. Up to a certain point, we can say that the mechanics of this cinematic machine's shutter is the celestial bodies movement itself. For me, the most extraordinary in this image is how almost all the time we can imagine collapses on it, a time beyond our understanding. These galaxies are 13 billion light-years away, a few hundred million light-years after the original Big-bang and they share the same image with many others that are much closer to us. We get used to thinking of images, mainly after the invention of photography - but always with mirrors, shadows and other phantasmagoria - as a snapshot, a representation and a fixing of an exact moment. No matter how much that time could be chronographic it would always be understood as momentary and fleeting. An image of a present that has escaped us, as the water that I was previously referring to. These deep fields, which result from the cumulation of light that comes from the beginning of times, seem to catch all the time, all the distance - that, indeed, we measure considering the time that light takes to reach us. And what do we see in these images? How do we interrogate them? What in fact do we want to see through them, the beginning of time or a future? We associate waiting for what is yet to come, but these images teach us that we also have to wait for the past. Without understating what time is, without understanding it, we have nothing left but the memory of what we are made of. These images, as almost all images, give shape to memory and, at the same time, they seem to come from the future.
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There was a time when images were rare and exclusive, there was a time when we invented machines and alchemies that multiplied images; now, there is a time when images become omnivorous and establish themselves as primary vehicles and almost automatics of expression, feeding a huge archive that grows without any clear aim or purpose. In fact, these images have never proliferated as they do today. As for images, much has been spoken about archive, the technical reproducibility of images or its present infinite and unstoppable cloning. Despite the impermanence and instability that digital gave to images, these are not only produced and infinitely reproduced, but if they are in the network, they seem destined to resist to disappearance, building a memory that is increasingly solid and unfathomable. So, how is it possible to recognise these images absorbed by the archive and by bits of numeric information, something more than an archaeological sense, than a small role in the construction of a diffuse and fragmentary memory? How is it possible to look at images and see a futurology that can inquire what is yet to come, as if seeing an image was like listening to an oracle? How is it then possible to think of images as something that is projected yet to come, more than as a memory or a document of something that has passed or something present? Isn’t that, in a certain way, what happens with this photograph taken with the Hubble telescope? Isn’t this the image of a time without measure, or of a time that is represented in things that move and that, by far, are continuously projected up to us, to suddenly come before us and immediately escape into de future?
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CONTRAST MORITZ nEumĂźller
Far From Home. Architecture, Archaeology, and Spatial Relations in the Photography of Paulina Lara and Eoin Moylan The following text a short analysis of the works of two contemporary artists who have used the photographic medium to create projects that play with an archaeology methodology, spatial relations, and the architectural context, both in the working process and in the way these projects materialize in exhibitions. They share a common interest in the fundamental questions related with photography, such as the truth-value, visual memory and the limits of the medium. The Notion of Home, by Paulia Lara (b. Mexico City, 1990, lives and works in Madrid) is a fictional archaeological research, which explores the recent past of demolished houses in the urban space of Madrid. Deposited in containers on the street, the houses are now little pieces of a forgotten story. Imitating the working style of archaeologists, the artist works with the materials collected from the containers, classifies them and photographs them, to reconstruct a personal and abstract version of those houses. By using her interpretation of this methodology, she attempts to elevate the status of construction debris to archaeological material. And then to an aesthetical status, showing the pieces as art forms. One of her intentions is to allow the viewers to rebuild the houses from their own background, creating their own notion of home. The raw materials from the demolished houses are like puzzles that can be organized in many possible ways; with aims to rebuild the house that once was, before being reduced to pieces. As part of the project, Paulina worked in a series of postcards. Through them she explores the complex relation between the need of appropriating the world through its objectification into photographic images, and how these places we photograph lose their meaning when became images.
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Paulina larA Untitled from the project “The Notion of Home”, 2017
CONTRAST MORITZ NEUMÜLLER
The documentation as an art form is a core part of this project, which has lead Paulina to a deep study on how the notion of home is interpreted; both as a place and as a symbol. This project has been developed not only by creating images, but presenting found materials and just let them be: as pieces of a wall, as sculptures, or as simple as pieces of time. This way, she also keeps the real version of the house nonvisible for the audience. The whole, the past of the fragments is veiled, and will only be reconstructed through mental images, creating a stronger connection based on our projections of the notion of home through the collection of images and object from this body of work. Down in the Valley by the Irish artist Eoin Moylan (born Calgary, 1983, lives and works in Berlin) is a long-term project undertaken in the Vale of Clara, in the county of Wicklow, Ireland. The concern of the artist reflected on this series is the subjective nature of experience, and the interpretation thereof. In the words of the artist “It attempts to assess a photograph’s place in terms of time and space; how a photograph, though rooted in a specific time and space, may draw a potential path to an alternate”. Specific attention has been paid in the construction of the display materials where it comes to both light and dimension. These two aspects are key in the possibility of photography and are explored within the design and construction of frames, projections and lightboxes. The exhibition starts with a large format projected image of the valley. This image lends itself to the picturesque. The subsequent images are the result of time spent within the area that initial photograph draws. These photographs lean towards the abstract and begin to symbolize the idea of what could be held within a single image. Sculptural frames and boxes have been produced with focus on linearity and simplicity. Light is contained within these boxed frames and serves to not only illuminate, but also to manipulate the images contained. Black and white photographs evolve into colour images, and colour images begin to transform or fade using only coloured light. The show culminates in two clamshell lightboxes that have been designed to specifically illuminate hand printed colour photographic images. The tone and density of light that is emitted from these boxes is reactive
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to sound, and there are three separate sound recordings that play on a loop. Each recording tells a short story about a specific memory, the light reacts to the sound of the recording and the images contained then produce different reactions from the different tones of light illuminated. It is important to know also that all of the materials in the exhibition are constructed from woods that have been locally sourced and have a direct correlation to the valley that is contained within these images. Linked to the human mind and how we collect memories and put them into images, this project touches the subtle frontiers between the reality of a specific moment, and the visual memory we create from that moment. And there is a place where we pour our past and create the present, even if is a fiction, because our minds are tricky, we cannot remember all, we make stories from the other’s stories. In that sense, the landscapes collected by Moylan as placed in an anonymous and timeless dimension, act as the scenario for the viewer to perform his own play; because it is in that dimension where the images take their meaning, not the author’s, not the viewer’s, but the melting of both.
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Paulina larA Untitled from the project “The Notion of Home”, 2017
eeoin molAn Untitled from the project “Down in the Valley”, 2017
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTS ANGELO MAGGI
Re-interpreting Kidder Smith’s Italy Builds: crossovers between photography and architecture. Keywords | Italian architecture, photography, urban design, visual research.
George Everard Kidder Smith (1913-1997) was an American architect and photographer. Photo historian Robert Elwall (1953-2012) considered him as an “architectural photographer on the run” because he travelled widely and “seldom taking more than fifteen minutes over a shot, never using lights and relying on local labs to process his films, yet still producing consistently impressive, richly textured prints”1. Trained also as an architectural writer and, like many of his generation, using the camera as a tool of analysis and memory, Kidder Smith knew a certain amount of history but by no means considered himself an historian. His book Italy Builds: Its modern architecture and native inheritance (1955) is a collection of astonishing architectural photographs, data and critical comment upon the traditional and modern architecture. The many forms of visual narratives adopted by the author became a valuable index to the kind of building the young mid-twentiethcentury architect was prepared to see when he travelled Italy. He thus simply records what has interested him in the architecture of the past and present, and the photographs and explanatory text directly reveal how he has seen it. His eyes goes first toward the primitive: the solid, earthheavy shapes of masonry, the panels of brickwork, the skeletons of wood, the directly functional types, the solemn personification of human qualities in the landscape. When Kidder Smith turns to contemporary Italian architecture he consequently develops new standards of judgments. He encapsulates in his photographs the great range of Italy’s modernist experience, always elegant, and usually with an intelligent touch. [Fig.1] It was the President’s Fellowship from Brown University, which enabled Kidder Smith to move with his wife and their two sons to Rome and travel around Italy from 1950 to 1951. Italy Builds was the 1 Robert Elwall, Building with light: the international history of architectural photography, Merrell, London and New York, 2004, p.158.
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fruit of that time in Italy. Before the book was printed, on 28th April 1952, a crowded audience attended at the RIBA in London a lecture by Kidder Smith on “Contemporary Italian Architecture and the Italian Heritage”. The addressees were rewarded by a racy and informative talk and some 50 superb coloured pictures. An anonymous writer has left a very illuminating description of the event: “This was one of those lectures which fill editors with despair because no printed report can convey to a reader its impact on the eye and mind of a member of the audience. Mr Kidder Smith’s succinct and acute comments on each slide – sometimes no more than a word or two as an aside – provided vivid mental pictures which are impossible to reproduce in print. But more especially the coloured slides showing buildings which depend very much for their architectural effect on subtle shades in renderings and concrete finishes are quite beyond the resources of anything but the most expensive production”2. Many of the themes discussed will appear later in the book. Kidder Smith explained how Italy is rumpled by hills and scattered by mountains. He also focused on climatic factors that characterize each region and influence different types of vernacular Italian architecture. He showed first slides of the older architecture and scenic background of Italian building, and then of some modern buildings. Kidder Smith thought that Italy Builds was his best book. It was described as a triumph because of the balance between photographs of older buildings and new buildings. Almost the first half of the book is devoted to seven different categories as examples: high mountain architecture; northern foot hill architecture; Dolomite types; plain lower Po valley architecture; central Appennini hills architecture; Naples bay coastal architecture; the trulli of Puglia. The second half of the book is an alternative vision of post-war reconstruction, creating the modern Italian townscape. [Fig.2] Architectural historian Joseph Rykwert (b.1926) criticises Kidder Smith’s approach to photographing architecture for his over-dramatization of buildings. While he says that “Mr. Smith is technically absolutely superb”, he takes issue with the photographer’s glamorization of architecture and thinks that Italy Builds optimistically misread the Italian situation. The designer 2 Anonymous reporter, “Mr. Kidder Smith’s Lecture”, RIBA Journal, 7 (1952), p.234.
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PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTS ANGELO MAGGI
Fig.1 G.E. Kidder Smith’s volume Italy Builds with its cover designed by Leo Lionni (1955).
Fig. 2 Kidder Smith in Venice holding his Rolleiflex, 1951.
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTS ANGELO MAGGI
Massimo Vignelli (1931-2014) was studying architecture in Italy in the 1950’s and thought then of Italy builds as Rykwert does. But looking at Italy Builds forty years after the publication he changed his mind. He says that Kidder Smith “had the kind of detachments to see much better”. It is the architectural historian Vincent Scully (b.1920) who gives a very detailed review of the book in his article titled “Architecture and ancestor worship”. He observes: “In Italy his eyes goes first to peasant architecture, to barns, farmhouses and massed villages in their landscape. Some beautiful photographs interpret these with the intense emotion of an age which feels itself out of touch with the basic nature of things. The eye is toward the primitive: the solid, earth-heavy shapes of masonry, the panels of brickwork, the skeletons of wood, the directly functional types, the solemn personifications of human qualities in the landscape. There develops a feeling for essential, not romantic, meaning. After this Kidder Smith with the best naiveté, rediscovers the beauty of the city streets and squares. Here he uses some plans from Sitte and others, but the photographs reveal his own sensitive and astonished eye. They constitute a valuable set of visual material for a study of how the twentieth century regards Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque squares. It shows an age which has been told in one way or another that the city was finished and which now, irrationally and rather magnificently, refuses to accept the fact. In these ways, and following its own needs, the present generation attempts to reconstitute the past for itself and for the future. When Kidder Smith turns to contemporary Italian architecture he has consequently developed standards of judgement. He finds it wanting in many respects but full of intense vitality in others. In his criticisms he occasionally matters, half apologetically, shibboleths derived from the fathers, but this is rare. For the most part the judgments are his own and are constructively sympathetic. He beautifully documents the work of the great engineer, Pier Luigi Nervi”3. [Fig.3] In Italy he found the ancient architecture fabulous. In his home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan he papered and entire living-room wall with a gigantic photographic print of the ruin 3 Vincent Scully, “Architecture and ancestor worship”, Art News, 10 (1956), p.57.
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Fig. 3 G.E. Kidder Smith’s roof photograph of P.L. Nervi’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Turin, 1951.
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTS ANGELO MAGGI
of the Upper Forum in Rome. “There is no country in the world – as Kidder Smith proclaims in the preface of the book – where such a study of the old can be more profitably undertaken than Italy”4. The introductory essay of the book, written by the architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers (1909-1969), is one of the most significant chapters and represents the key to the choice of works and their interpretation. Rogers, who at that time was professor at the Politecnico di Milano and director of the architectural magazine Casabella, fundamentally guided Kidder Smith during his photo journey. According to Kidder Smith the main object of admiration in Italy is the urban scene. He considers it “an aesthetic experience”. He leads the reader into the well sculptured spaces by a series of special sequence photographs that interpret in two dimensions the three dimensions of the spaces. Each photograph bears a number and each page spread has a plan showing by numbered arrows the viewpoint and direction of the photographs. As stated by Scully, the model for Kidder Smith’s book was Camillo Sitte’s (1843-1903) Der Städtebau, the German ideologue and historian’s work provided insights into how to enrich text with eloquent comparisons between urban plans and photographs5. The purpose of the images was to add evidence and detail content developed by the text and drawings. Kidder Smith considered Sitte’s volume “electric” and “enormously valuable in spite of automobiles, airplanes and atom bombs”6. [Fig.4] There are many key figures from the architectural world acknowledged by Kidder Smith right at the beginning of the book. Obviously all the Italian architects and engineers who presented the author with plans and images of their works are fully recognized. Two of them are quite important and they need to be revealed. The first one is Giuliana Baracco (d.2003), Giancarlo De Carlo’s 4 George Everard Kidder Smith, Italy Builds: Its modern architecture and native inheritance / Italia Costruisce: Sua architettura moderna e sua eredità indigena. (New York: Reinhold 1955 and Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1955) p.15. 5 The seminal book by Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künslerischen Grundsätzen vermehrt um Grosstadtgrün was published in Vienna in 1889. The first English translation did not appear until 1945, in the United States. Prior to that, Sitte was known in the English-speaking world only through two commentaries that had appeared in important books on urban design, Raymond Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice (1909) and Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets’s American Vitruvius (1926). 6 Italy Builds, op. cit., p.263.
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wife, who translated the entire text into Italian. I like to imagine one of the most penetrating and prophetic architectural thinkers of our time, such as De Carlo, while discussing with his wife about the importance of this seminal book for the architectural evolution of a new countrywide identity7. The second one is Gordon Cullen (1914-1994) who wrote the endpaper and designed four sketches for the volume: the elevation of a farmhouse at Sala Alta; a perspective view of the Italian village of Manarola; the areal view of Piazza Umberto I in Capri; the changes of urban levels at Cornello. Cullen probably encapsulated the concept of visual coherence and organisation of urban environment, under the theme of ‘townscape’ in the pages of Kidder Smith’s book. Italy builds awakened interest in visual perception and consequent ‘improving’ that can be accomplished in an objective manner through an understanding of the emotional effects created by the juxtaposition of physical elements of the environment. As English architect and urban designer Cullen believed that the changes of level, texture and vista of Italy’s historic piazze, so meticulously presented by Kidder Smith, could be proffered as prototypes for contemporary practitioners charged with the redevelopment of city centres. Significantly he wrote: “Mr. Kidder Smith approaches the spatial genius of the past with the resolution to make it live for the present and the future. His beautiful photographs and analyses of ancient squares and cities point the way to tomorrow’s finer shopping centers, housing developments, and civic cores”8. [Fig.5] To better convey movement through the urban scene Kidder Smith used a series of changing perspective photographs to describe what one might see and experience as one walks through a sequence of serial visions. He coined the phrase “architectural notes” when taking pictures with his inconspicuous Rolleiflex in crowded squares and streets. Yet, every image remains a static view—a moment in time—as seen from a single point in space. Kidder Smith used visual strategy to construct his argument on Italian sites, cities concentrating on the urban setting in its vertical 7 During the making of Italy Builds De Carlo was part of the editorial staff of Casabella Continuity directed by Rogers. He resigned to disagreements on the line of the magazine in 1956. 8 Gordon Cullen’s words from the endpaper of the English Reinhold edition of Italy Builds (1955). He wrote a seminal book with the title Townscape published in 1961.
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PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTS ANGELO MAGGI
Fig. 4 G.E. Kidder Smith’s photograph of House of the Vettii in Pompei.
Fig. 5 G. Cullen’s sketch of Piazza Umberto I in Capri in Italy Builds.
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accent and in its change of levels. He wrote that “Although many successful streets are products of an unplanned spontaneity still the basic feeling of Italians for creative ‘rightness’ is eternally manifest in their appearance”9. One of the most memorable photography chronicles is a doublepage spread devoted to the levels at Piazza di Spagna in Rome. He approaches the pulsating elegant space of Santa Trinità dei Monti from above giving readers the ability to fully experience “an urban stair that not only takes one up and down, as any stair must do, but makes the trip a visual and emotional pleasure, as few stairs do”10.[Fig.6] Curiously on another page of the volume, Marius Gravot’s 1931 renowned photograph of the architectural promenade at Ville Savoye is compared to the handling of the various levels of approach to the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. According to Kidder Smith: “Le Corbusier obtained for our own time, and with a more modest dimension, much of this space-motion delight with his masterful ramps”11. We know that the French architect didn’t fully invent the idea. It is interesting to notice that Kidder Smith, who was evidently a great fan of Le Corbusier’s work, matches the sequence of spaces and direction of movement in Assisi with a twentieth century building based on the specific construction of a promenade with “constructed” views, vistas and experiences. Giving substance to the issue of the modern architecture of Italy, Kidder Smith establishes the background of the new architecture in a succession of eight double-page spread with photography strips placed in top margins. Here is quite evident the unstated objective of the book which is not only its lack of emphasis on specific buildings but also in how the sequence of interdependent montages makes the meaning of each individual image flexible: the images play a part in the larger argument rather than acting as fixed icons. This gives the book a singular point of view and a considerable photographic punch. Captioning is minimal. The listing of architects and designers appears under the black-and-white thumbnail illustrations while project name and item descriptions are all contained in an index at the end of the book. [Fig.7]
9 Italy Builds, op.cit., p.104. 10 Ibid., p.100. 11 Ibid., p.98.
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After these montages Kidder Smith carries out an extensive photographic report on weekend villas, artist’s studios, low cost and workers housing, apartments, health colonies, war memorials, museum installations and temporary exhibition pavilions, fashionable designed shops, fish markets, factories and warehouses. Surprisingly contemporary church architecture seems to be omitted, but it is the same author who apologizes for the forced reduction in the size of the volume from 320 pages to 265 actual ones. “This made it necessary to eliminate much technical matter and many excellent buildings, and to cramp the remainder on to too few pages”12. He will later develop the most stimulating ecclesiastic workshop of that time in his book The Churches of Europe (1964) where seven Italian modern religious buildings are shown. In this part of Italy Builds his photographs, sober and direct images that emphasize the geometry of buildings, show the basic outlines of new Italian architecture. The composition is based on the vertical lines of the walls and the diagonal lines of the roofs, which infuses the pictures with dynamism and rhythm. In this section a couple of Kidder Smith’s photographs feature clipping images and drawings from previously printed material. Cleverly pasting onto the same page the front elevation of an apartment house in Taranto and a full-page picture capturing the vantage point overlooking from the balcony framed by the brise-soleil, is one of the book’s visual greatest achievement. It provides evidence in support of his ideas. The same visual strategy can be seen in the pages devoted to Figini and Pollini’s apartments in Milan, via Broletto. Here different images of a lively façade and the panels of “vibrated concrete grille set in the exposed structural frames”13 exercise an emotional effect on the viewer. [Fig.8] The poet Paul Valery (1871-1945) thought that photography freed the writer from describing. In this specific case the pictures taken by Kidder Smith for Italy Builds do not describe in the same way as writing. Photography confirms the precedence of visual over textual reasoning in his strategy. The page sequences are dynamic. The book’s visual strategy evokes a modern grand tour – in which the readers eyes and feet are guided through a feverish rebuilt country - resulting in a vibrant perception of space and stimulating an emotional reaction to the built environment. Italy Builds, on the wake of the success between architectural photography and personal architecture criticism, embodies a new creative processes which brought to light new ways of understanding both fields. 12 Ibid., p.133. 13 Ibid., p.157.
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PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTS ANGELO MAGGI
Fig. 6 G.E. Kidder Smith’s volume Italy Builds with its double-page spread of the levels at the Piazza di Spagna and Trinità dei Monti.
Fig. 7 Two of the most iconic pictures in Kidder Smith’s volume Italy Builds: a worker’s housing in Naples by Cocchia, De Luca, Della Sala architects and the Cathedral square at Orvieto.
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTS ANGELO MAGGI
Fig. 8 G.E. Kidder Smith’s Italy Builds with its double-page spread of the apartment house in Taranto by Monaco and Luccichienti architects.
THE BODY IN PHOTOGRAPHY ren hang
Poems, by Ren Hang Ângela Ferreira
Poems provide an opportunity to introduce the Chinese new generation of Photography, the multiple visions from the author Ren Hang. The vision’s sense and the image itself already carry with them ambiguities and contradictions. The vision, when perceived as the “act of seeing”, has the ability to observe, verify and certify. But, concurrently, it has the uncertainty of the illusion and delusion, of the fascination and wonder. In that odyssey through the multiple visions of such a different language like the Chinese photography, we highlight a new generation of eastern photographers who rise over the visionary universe of the eastern photography fields. Ren Hang is a young photographer, poet and provocative, who explores the possibilities of the body through an extrovert and joyful sexuality, producing perfect photographs on a spontaneous and creative way, which form audacious and funny sculptures of the human body. In this way, we dare to present a brief portrait of the Chinese photography current state, on its complexity and diversity, and offer a view over that new generation of photographers who reveals such an intense introspective aesthetic.
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Born in 1987 in Chang Chun, Jilin province in Northeastern China, Ren Hang is a photographer and poet. Living and working in Beijing, Ren Hang is influenced by Chinese culture and his immediate environment. His images also constitute a portrait of his own generation and of China’s urban youth culture, longing for individual freedom and spiritual liberty. They reflect a spontaneous lifestyle which seeks out liberty. Hang’s intimate photographs directly challenge moral and social taboos in China by exploring the human body and sexuality, especially homosexuality, which was considered a mental illness in China until 2001. His experience of regular censorship has influenced his artistic practice and the aesthetic of his photographs. On the one hand, they are carefully censored, yet on the other hand, they are inherently of the moment: a consequence of his – not always voluntarily – quick working method. Ren Hang’s work has been banned in many galleries in China. Despite this, he has been exhibited widely in Russia, Italy, France, Sweden, United Kingdom, Austria and China as well. Ren Hang’s analogue photographs are about human emotions, relationships and friendships, and also fear and loneliness. Young women and men – mostly friends of the artist – pose naked in vulnerable, occasionally explicit poses. With their gaze often directed straight at the camera, the models always assume an active role. In the portraits, taken in front of monochromatic backdrops, on the roof of high-rise buildings or in natural landscapes, animals such as snakes, birds or cats and flowers appear as props. In twisted poses and unusual arrangements, bodies are an abstract element to Ren Hang. The naked human body becomes a malleable sculpture and is thus desexualised. Still, the artist’s photographs are always suffused with a subtle humour.
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viewfinder photography contest
SCOPIO International Photography Contest Crossing borders and shiftong boundaries: City The photography contest's 5th edition, titled Crossing Borders Shifting Boundarie: City, was focused on diverse countries and on how the migratory movements have influenced the places and people (identities) of those territories. The primarily focus of this 5th edition was on the subject of residential spaces, public spaces, urban scattered communities and city life in general. We were interested in showing works that characterise the rich multifaceted world of contemporary cities and/ or non-traditional urban communities regarding immigrants or minorities’ different types of blocks, neighbourhoods, cultural diversity and values expressed in various types of residential and public spaces. Among other things, it is on looking at architectural spaces and their many signs, which reveal the values, customs and culture of the people who live there. In fact, the aim is to show a varied set of works capable of providing a creative and significant body of evidence as regards to the diversity and richness of our cities’ architecture and life. In addition, it was also open to photography projects that focused on the cities’ multiple hybrid cultural identities and the layers of history embedded in their architecture, in order to understand how social, economic and political systems and values affect the way people live and work on those places and countries. In search of new talents, the jury awarded to the projects “Escape Architecture” (Jürgen Beck, winner) and “New Leipzig” (Silke Koch, honourable mention), "Disappearing into Night" (David Kendall, honourable mention). The projects can be seen in scopio network Gallery CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS.
“Escape Architecture “ (Jürgen Beck, winner) Seen by Walter Costa Escape Architecture is a study about modern architecture, but not a mere inventory. Beck is interested in both aesthetic and sociological meanings of a style that was born in a doubtful present to represent a shiny future. Swinging between paper and copper prints, the pictures
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go back and forth from city landscapes to details, David Spero’s Churches and Stefan Keppel’s Entre Entree are echoing. Beck points at capitalism which was in crisis in the thirties as it is now, suggesting how evasive and tricky was that architectural reaction (What about now?). Standing like mausoleums of a desired zeitgeist, a hope rather than a reality, modernist buildings are depicted as artificial as the lives on the movie screen.
“New Leipzig” (Silke Koch, honourable mention) Seen by Walter Costa “New” is a recurrent prefix for cities and states, which adds the meaning of a hopeful fresh start to the often nostalgic use of the place of origin. In Silke Koch’s pictures, the hundred years old New Leipzig seems to have lost both hope and original identity if it ever had one. Through her rigorously composed images, Koch shows the impossibility to draw parallels between her home city in Saxony and this small town in North Dakota, a 200 inhabitants village where trophies turn their backs in the future. Signs are the only loose and dystopic connections, raising a kind of Paris or Texas feeling. "Disappearing into Night" (David Kendall, honourable mention) Seen by Pedro Leão Neto ...
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viewfinder 1st prize | jürgen beck
synopsis Escape Architecture In my recent work I photographically retrieve and examine commercial structures of the 1920s and 1930s in their distinctive architectural manifestations: bars, movie theaters, malls, hotels, department stores and warehouses. For some time, modern architecture of the early 20th century has evolved into being one of my art practice’s distinguished subjects. The reason being that howsoever modern it may appear in terms of structure and material, these buildings are, paradoxically, highly eclectic compositions, often referencing a variety of historically incoherent, even contradictory styles. As Robert Smithson put it in his 1967 essay »Ultramodern«: they function as »an architecture out of time.« Embedded in an economically problematic historical context, particularly the years of the Great Depression in America, modern architecture appears to have created an elusive sphere of suggestion and illusionism as complex as the simultaneously developed realm of the moving images. Seeing the western hemisphere now, as networked late capitalist cityscapes, it is like no other intertwined with the architectural remains and fragments of the coming-of-age of a modern consumer society. It is precisely a form of intoxication, an extravagant celebration of the commodity and suspension of social reality that lays at the heart of my exploration. — Jürgen Beck
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viewfinder HONORABLE MENTION | Silke Koch
synopsis New Leipzig People need to (re) invent to survive since the beginning of human history. I am interested in shifting boundaries and how is it look like: My home town Leipzig compared to New Leipzig. And what is the „NEW“ in New Leipzig. German everyday life or American dream? Is New Leipzig an observation or a statement, fiction or reality? At the beginning of the 19th century, thousands of Europeans set off for America. They whished to leave their home behind – or even had to. For a new world, for adventure, for the land of the unlimited opportunities. A world offering the opportunity to reinvent or complete themselves or to find a new interpretation of tradition. What’s the meaning of New in New Leipzig? And where can you locate the New Leipzig School? —Silke Koch
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viewfinder HONORABLE MENTION | David Kendall
synopsis Disappearing into Night In Gulf cities the rapid development of urban infrastructures transforms the built environment. In these settings electrical light sculpts new architectural landscapes, reorganises boundaries and visually erodes soon-to-be forgotten neighbourhoods erased by structural change. At night in Doha, Qatar, artificial light and built environment fuse together to form fresh visual landscapes. The afterglow of overhanging floodlights merges with fluctuating climatic conditions to guide the focal direction. Therefore, revealing or hiding the ‘seen or unseen’ in architectural sites occupied by an unsettled expatiate workforce rebuilding cityscapes. Crumbling sites become saturated and cloaked by the diffused electric light generated by 24-hour construction sites. In addition, temporality is an important structural component; the luminosity of building sites extends beyond the foreground, projected on existing facades, walls, buildings and streets. Sensory experiences of photography juxtapose with perceptual manifestations of resettlement whilst roaming at night. Overtime construction fences and hoardings are put up and buildings taken down changing the over-illuminated landscape. In residential streets atmospheres emerging that appears to be silent yet in reality never sleep in the sky glow enveloping the biosphere. Consequently, the camera exposes traces of human occupation and precarious social infrastructures. Spaces where people rest, worship and trade in the glare of construction Thus, activating new discourse about planning processes, heritage and environmental impacts of migration, construction and infrastructure development along the Arabian Peninsula. —David Kendall
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viewfinder photobook contest
SCOPIO International Photobook Contest Crossing borders and shifting boundaries: City The 5th edition of scopio International Photobook Contest, as the name implies, is directed towards the creation of an Artist Photobook, which also involves the visual definition of a concept. Titled Crossing Borders Shifting Boundaries: City, this contest was focused on diverse countries and on how the migratory movements have influenced the places and people (identities) of those territories. The focus is on creating a narrative, of no less than 20 images with a descriptive memory of 1500 words, assuming that by presenting a story the reader will be pulled in and “entertained”. In this case, an image is linked with the next one at a fundamental, conceptual and emotional level, increasing the reader’s attention to the work in order to figure out what those connections are. Our aim is to reveal the potential of the photobook as a mature medium capable of communicating different perspectives and of combining diverse art expressions to convey in a unique way the rich multi-layered contemporary issues related to architecture, city spaces and the territory where people live and work. In this sense, we are accepting entries of small limited editions of Artist Photobooks or Dummies, as long as they follow the regulations and the publishing disclosure rights of the contest. In search of new talents, the jury awarded to the photobook “Studio Breiner House “ (Charles Sarrazin, winner). The winners work will be published in scopio Authors Book Collection and the organisation has selected a set of self-published dummies to be part of the Cityzines showcase in scopio Network.
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“Studio Breiner House” (Charles Sarrazin, winner) Seen by Dieter Neubert The photographer gives us interestingly detailed insight into the Breiner House, where Erasmus students use to live together during their stay in the city centre of Porto. Charles Sarrazin a French Erasmus student - created this photobook and called it STUDIO BREINER HOUSE because he not only lived in this large old house, but also used it simultaneously as his studio. The simple black & white photographs - views inside the house and views from there towards the city - combined with text notes give the viewer a first concentrated impression of the very special living space of Erasmus students in Porto today. In the second part of the book, we see the subjects themselves, intense portraits of the students, all in the same format and with the same focused dark background. The last chapter finally changes into colour, and the movement changes from a more documentary style at the beginning to a subjective stage-managed, lively kind of photography. I like this simply made book because of its simplicity, and Charles Sarrazin’s photography because of its dispassionate way of looking. JURY OF THE INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY AND PHOTOBOOK CONTEST
Ângela Ferreira Curator, Researcher and Art Educator // Photography & Cinema Dieter Neubert Founder and Director of the Kassel Fotobookfestival Moritz Neumüller Director of the European Master in Art Photography Pedro Leão Neto Coordinator of CCRE research group and scopio Editions Walter Costa Photographer, Teacher and Independent Editor
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viewfinder 1st prize | charles sarrazin
synopsis Studio Breiner House Breiner Book is a Roman Photo book based on a true story which happened in the house I lived in Porto with my twenty-five roommates. I have always been dazzled by the perpetual motion of our world. We destroy we build and we transform over and over. I enjoy working on my projects with this idea of movement and transformation. The question is to discern where and how a piece is a part of its own context. In what ways it is both change and continuity. How this piece becomes an object of transition using the interpretation we make of the past, the present and the future. This notion of change is not one-sided. It is obvious that the world we build has an incidence on our existence, the same way the house may have had. Through the prism of our perception, the environment becomes a reality. Through the prism of our imagination, we change it. The Breiner Book was born of inspiration through these reflexions. This questioning is apparent in his composition and technic.The first chapter deals with space, light, and the area’s architecture unoccupied and neutral. The second chapter is the opposite of the first. It deals with residents I would call «actors» in neutral architectural context. Finally the third one summarizes the first two chapters adding transformation through the prism of imagination. Then the fiction transcends the reality through evocation and the reader’s point of view. This is a story of several stories. But don’t you think that creating is above all telling and perhaps interpreting a story? Obrigado Porto…
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flash andreia alves de oliveira
Andreas Gursky After two years of renovation works, the Hayward has reopened to the public with a solo show by Andreas Gursky. A selection of works covering the German photographic artist's production of the last four decades is carefully choreographed throughout the two levels of the 1960s brutalist building, part of the riverside Southbank Centre complex. The conventional white cube interior combines with the austerity of the concrete to create a suitably authoritative backdrop for the 68 photographs on display, most of them of very large scale (Information on dimensions and technique is absent from both wall labels and complementary exhibition guide.), all sumptuously encased in solid wood and metal frames and state of the art glass. As it can be read on the wall label to Prada II (1997), “what arouses our desire... is not the object alone but the way it is framed. ”Could the assertion be applicable not only to shoes and commodities, but also to photographs? The subjects of Gursky's photographs range from rave parties, to trading floors and supermarket interiors (to name the most famous), encompassing as many genres: documentary, landscape, art photography. Described as a chronicle of “emblematic sites of global capitalism” (exhibition booklet), and an “encyclopaedia of life” (Gursky), his oeuvre has consistently employed digital construction, large scale, and the-non serial format of the tableau, to successfully fuse photography and painting and create a hybrid between the two mediums and the traditionally separate forms of image making they imply. Architecture and the built environment are extensively addressed in this visual compendium of the look of the anthropocene world. Salerno I (1990), a self-acknowledged “turning point”, shows an elevated view of the port city of Salerno in Italy photographed using the conventions of the objective mode (deep focus, extreme sharpness and high detail, neutral camera position, parallel to the picture plane). However, unlike more typical topographic images, a slight long focal range or telephoto lens was used together with the large format camera. The result is a compression of the distance between the foreground and background, producing an altered perspective that disorients human vision. The effect is repeated and amplified through coupling with other techniques in several images, Paris, Montparnasse (1993) being perhaps one of the most memorable. Differently from traditional photographic images, Gursky's photographs do not offer the viewer a single point of view from where to look at them. Deprived from the illusion of our subjective vantage point, we are confronted with the evidence of the Other's vision. Except that now the Other is no longer simply the photographer and the photographic apparatus. Gursky's images unsettlingly take machine vision to another level. The aesthetics of neutrality taught by the Bechers have the rhetorical effect here of making the photographs speak from and speak of a world radically beyond the human.
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Andreas Gursky Hayward Gallery, installation view (2018) Installation view, Salerno I (1990).
X-ray
Ângela Ferreira, Braga, Portugal. PhD in Visual
‘Architecture, Design and Art in Italy’ (2013)
Communication at the University of Minho in
examines the history of the architectural design
cooperation with the School of Fine Arts of the
culture of Italy through an analysis of its most
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Artist,
influential photographer. He is also author of
curator and researcher in the field of visual arts;
‘Photo Graphic Pedia’ (2014) and ‘Re-visioning
Her work has been shown in several individual
Venice 1893-2013 Ongania/Romagnosi’ (2014).
and collective exhibitions and has published
Maggi has widely written books for Alinari.
Photography and Text works on Portuguese India and on the Painted Portraits of the Brazilian Indians.
Charles Sarrasin, Charles Sarrazin, was born in Macon, France in 1990. Graduated
Angelo Maggi, Associate professor of History of
in Architecture at Nanci. He has done the
Architectural Photography at Università IUAV di
Erasmus programme in Porto, Portugal and he
Venezia. He was trained as architect at IUAV and
submitted his final work to the scopio Photobook
Edinburgh College of Art, where he obtained his PhD
Contest 2017 and has won the 1st prize. He
in Architecture and Visual Studies. His teaching in
lives and works in the south of France.
Italy and abroad and his recent work has revolved around the study of architectural photography,
David Kendall, David Kendall’s practice explores
analysing themes relative to representation
how spatial, economic and design initiatives, as well
understood as a tool of history investigations.
as participatory practices, combine to encourage
His books include the Italian editions of Robert
social and spatial interconnections or dissonance
Byron’s ‘The Appreciation of Architecture’ (2006)
in cities. He is a graduate of London College of
and Helmut Gernshiem’s ‘Focus on Architecture
Communication (LCC) University of the Arts London
and Sculpture’ (2011). Along with his sole authored
and Goldsmiths, University of London where he
book ‘Rosslyn Chapel an Icon’ through the ages
studied photography, design and sociology. In
(2008), Maggi co-authored (with Michael Gray)
addition, his photographs, spatial research and
Evelyn George Carey. Forth bridge (2009) and
collaborative projects have been exhibited and
co-edited (with Nicola Navone) ‘John Soane
presented in museums and institutes around the
and the Wooden Bridges of Switzerland’.
world, including: The British Library, London, UK,
Architecture and the culture of technology from
ETNOFILm, Ethnographic Museum of Istria, Rovinj,
Palladio to the Grubenmanns (2003). His book
Croatia, Jüdisches Museum, Berlin, Germany, Centro
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Cultural Manuel Gómez Morín, Querétaro, Mexicó,
exhibition Photobook Phenomenon at CCCB
Tate Britain, London, UK, Goldsmiths, University
Barcelona and The Routledge Companion to
of London, UK, Museo De Arte Del Banco De La
Photography and Visual Culture, to be published
Republica, Bogotá, Colombia, Akademin Valand,
by Taylor & Francis, New York in 2018. Since 2010,
Göteborg, Sweden, University of Cambridge, UK,
he runs the The Curator Ship, a platform that
and University of Oxford, UK. His photographic
provides useful information for visual artists. In
essays, reviews and interviews are found in
2009, Neumüller founded ArteConTacto, with the
books, periodicals, catalogues, journals and on
mission to make museums open to all audiences.
websites, including; ICON - 076 (2009), Street
ArteConTacto was recently invited to join the
Signs (CUCR, Goldsmiths, University of London,
EU-funded project ARCHES, which runs until 2019.
2007, 2009, 2012, 2014), Open City: Designing Coexistence (Amsterdam: SUN Architecture,
Eoin Moylan, born in Calgary 1983, Eoin Moylan
2009), www.openvizor.com (2009, 2011, 2012),
is an Irish artist whose practices are focused
Signs of the times - Monocle 24: The Urbanist
in the communicative process of images and
(2012), South Asian Diaspora 4 (1) (2012),
image making, producing photographic work
Architecture, Photography, and the Contemporary
that explores both the technical delivery and
Past (Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing,
psychological intimation of photography. The main
2014) and Urban Pamphleteer #4: Heritage and
theme within his work is “decision”, specifically in
Renewal in Doha (London: UCL Urban Lab, 2014).
reference to time and space, and the effect thereof in terms of both past and present experience.
Dieter Neubert, Moritz Neumüller, Ph.D. (b. Linz, Austria, 1972) is a curator, educator and writer in
Jorge Figueira, born in Vila Real, Portugal, 1965,
the field of Photography and New Media. He has
graduated in Architecture at the University of
worked in research and management positions
Porto in 1992. PhD Degree at the University of
for international institutions such as the Museum
Coimbra, 2009. Director and Assistant Professor
of Modern Art in New York, La Fábrica in Madrid
of the Department of Architecture of Faculty of
and PhotoIreland, in Dublin. He currently directs
Sciences and Technology of University of Coimbra.
the Photography Department of IED Madrid and
Researcher at the Social Studies Centre, University
is chief curator of the Photobookweek Aarhus,
of Coimbra. Professor at the Phd Programme
Denmark. Recent curatorial projects include the
in the Faculty of Architecture of University of
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X-ray
Porto. Coordinator at the University of Coimbra
Anadia; Organised and conceived the exposition
of the Red PHI Patrimonio Historico-Cultural
“My Choice - choices of Paula Rego at the British
Iberoamericano. Curator of "Álvaro Siza. Modern
Council’s collection”, for the House of Caldeiras, at
Redux", Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Sao Paulo, Brazil,
the University of Coimbra, in 2011. In 2013 showed
2008. Editor of Álvaro Siza. Modern Redux,
videos at New York and Paris (“Fuso NY”, Union
Hatje Cantz (Berlin). Author of several books on
Square, and “Chantiers d’Europe”, Theatre de la
contemporary architecture, including Reescrever
Ville) and in 2011 in Oslo (“When a painting moves…
o Pós-Moderno, Dafne, 2011, Macau 2011, Circo de
Something must be rotten!”, Stenersen Museum).
Ideias, O Arquitecto Azul, Coimbra University Press,
Between 2011 and 2014 performed 4 individuals
2010, A noite em arquitectura, Relógio d'Água,
expositions around the theme of his theses of PhD
2007. Has published texts in several publications
(Archive and Memory), at the CAV, Coimbra; In 2015,
in Portugal and abroad in AV Monografias,
was published a book of his photographies, “Partir
Arqtexto, aU, Arquitectura Viva, Casabella,
por todos os dias”, at the Publisher “Amieira”.
A+U and SAJ Serbian Architectural Journal.
Already in 2016, participates in the book “Asprela”, photography about the University of Porto’s
José Maças de Carvalho, born at Anadia (Portugal)
Campus, edited by Scopio Editions and ESMAE/IPP.
in 1960. Exposes photography since 1990 and video since 2000. Doctorate Degree in Contemporary Art
Jürgen Beck, born in Tübingen in 1977 and studied
- College of Arts of University of Coimbra, in 2014;
at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and at
studied Literature in the 80’s at the University of
the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. From
Coimbra and Management of Artes in the 90’s at
2008 to 2010 he was a master student with
Macao, where he lived and worked; Teacher in the
Christopher Muller also at the Academy of Visual
Department of Architecture at the College of Arts
Arts Leipzig and then worked as an assistant in
in the University of Coimbra; Plastic Artist. Fellow at
the Studio Sharon Lockhart in Los Angeles for
Caloust Gulbenkian Foundation, F. Oriente, Camões
one year. From 2012 to 2015 he was assistant
Institute, Photography Portuguese Center and
at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences,
Arts Institute/Gdartes. In 2003, commissioners
Department of Architecture, Department of Design;
and projects the temporary and permanent
since the summer of 2015, he is a scholarship
expositions of the Wine of Bairrada Museum, at
holder in the studio of the city of Zurich in Genoa.
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Luis Ferreira Alves, born at Valadares (Portugal)
Design at Hongik University in Seoul and a
in 25 of April of 1938. In 1954, begins his active
Diplom degree in Fine Arts Academy of Dresden,
political life and militant against dictatorship
specializing in Expanded Concepts of Art/ Mixed
Active sectionalist of the Porto’s Cineclub, where
Media Art. Her current works were featured and
collaborated in the section of texts and was
presented in exhibitions/venues such as Salon
co-founder of the Section of Reduced Format
Sophie Charlotte, Berlin (2016), Motorenhalle
and Experimental Cinema. With the impulse of
and Oktogon, Dresden (2014/2017), Centro
Henrique Alves Costa participated in the collective
de Memória, Vila do Conde (2015), GNRation,
realisation of the documentary “Auto das Floripes”.
Braga(2015), Espacio ZAWP, Bilbao (2015), Maus
In 1982 and owing to his activity as amateur
Hábitos, Porto(2015), Artspace O, Seoul (2017) etc.
photographer (expositions at the “Cooperativa
She currently collaborates with scopio Editions.
Árvore”), the architect Pedro Ramalho, youth friend, presented at the ESBAP (Superior School of
Miguel Leal, born in Porto, in 1967, where he
Fine Arts of Porto) a diaporam of his architectural
lives and works. Has a Master degree in History
work, with imagens that were taken freely; that
of Art from FLUP, Porto. (1999). Post-graduated
was the start point to his activity as a professional
(2005) in Language and Communication Sciencies
photographer of architecture, having abandoned
at FCSH-UL (Lisbon). PhD (2010, UP) "Blind
right after all his others activities. Culturally and
Imagination: indetermination mechanisms in
affectively connected to the protagonists of
contemporary artistic practice." Visual artist and
the “School of Porto”, was from that circle that
Professor at the School of Fine Arts, University
developed his work until today. Regularly publishes
of Porto (FBAUP). A few recent exhibitions:
imagens in architecture magazines throughout the
Cripta, Laboratório das Artes, Guimarães (2011),
entire world. Has dozens of works (architectural,
Aqui Fora, Uma Certa Falta de Coerência/A
institutional and others) published in and out doors.
Certain Lack of Coeherence, Porto (2010), Keats,
In September of 2013, was prized with the title
Keaton & Jürgenson, In.Transit, Porto (2009),
of Honorary Member of the Architecture Order.
SATURNO, Galeria Fernando Santos , Porto (2007). Provided some lectures and talks like
Jiôn Kiim, was born in Korea. She currently lives
“Os desafios do digital”, Ciclo Criação Cultural
and works in Porto. She holds a BFA in Industrial
e Tecnologias, Valença, Biblioteca Calouste
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X-ray
Gulbenkian, Abril/April 2002; “Thicker lines,
Ren Hang was born in 1987 in Jilin, China. Ren is
sensible spaces: Art in-between borderlines”,
a poet and photographer. Splicing imagery of
International Conference Borders, Displacement
urban and rural environments as a metaphor
and Creation: questioning the Contemporary,
for the increasingly citified millennials of today,
Porto, Universidade do Porto, 03/09/2011.
he arranges the naked limbs of his friends in his hide-and-seek photographs. In these images, the
Moritz Neumuller, born in Linz, Austria, 1972,
subjects’ expressions are casual yet provocative,
holds a Master Degree in Art History and a PhD
hinting at the erotic and playful energies between
Degree in Information Management. He has
Ren Hang and his intimate circle of companions.
worked for institutions such as the Museum of
Ren Hang’s work has been the subject of group
Modern Art in New York, La Fábrica in Madrid and
exhibitions worldwide, including "Medium of
PhotoIreland, in Dublin and currently directs the
Desire: An International Anthology of Photography
Photography Department of IED Madrid. He is
and Video," Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay
a regular contributor to European Photography
and Lesbian Art, New York, NY (2015-2016);
Magazine (Berlin) and on the editorial board of the
"Contemporary Photography in China 2009-
encyclopaedia project The European History of
2014," Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China
Photography (Bratislava). Furthermore, he runs an
(2014); "FACELESS," Stichting Mediamatic,
online resource for visual artists, called The Curator
Amsterdam, Netherlands (2014); "FACELESS part
Ship, and is a curator of the Photobookweek
1," Museums Quartier, Vienna, Austria (2013);
Aarhus, Denmark. His filmography includes The
"Originate from Energy Resource," Multimedia
Other Side of the Soul (Cuba/Austria, 2002),
Art Museum Moscow, Moscow, Russia (2012);
a 20 min. film, shown at the International Black
and "Qui & Ren Hang INNER EAR," Ullens Center
Film Festival in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Vienna and
for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2011). Ren
Ljubljana, and deutsch sein kunstsprach (Austria,
Hang currently lives and works in Beijing, China.
2005), a 52 min. Documentary film on the (un) translatability of Ernst Jandl's poetry, for the
Né Santelmo, born in 1958. Is a graphic designer
Austrian Broadcasting Company and selected
(school of Fine Arts of Porto, 1982) and she has
for the Rose d’Or Festival (Lucerne) in 2006.
attended several seminars and workshops on
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Animated Film (Avignon and Lille, France, 1981
and a PhD in Planning and Landscape (University
and 1982). Since 1982 she has been working
of Manchester, 2002). He has curated several
as a Communication Designer and has founded
architectural photography exhibitions and
the Atelier Pã Design (Porto, 1990) and Atelier
international seminars, is director of the cultural
Coisas Assim. She is currently working on
association Cityscopio, coordinator of the
her own and is developing projects related
International Conference ‘On the Surface’, as well
to photography. She has published her own
as coordinator of Scopio Editions, with special
work in national and international books and
focus on Documentary and Artistic Photography
magazines, and has won several awards.
related to Architecture, City and Territory.
Paulina Lara, is a visual artist born in Mexico
Pedro Pousada, born in 1970, is currently sub
in 1990 and currently based in Madrid, Spain.
director of Colégio das Artes (UC). He works
Her work explores themes as space, identity,
as an Assistant Professor at the Architecture
city, memory and representation. She uses
Department of FCTUC. He is also a visual
photography, installation and drawing among
artist with extensive experience in the field of
others, and often collaborates with other artist
contemporary drawing and an advisor of the
and professionals from different disciplines.
Círculo de Artes Plásticas de Coimbra (CAPC). His artistic work is regularly shown and he has
Pedro Leão Neto, born in Porto, 1962. Has
participated in individual and collective exhibitions.
a degree in Architecture from the School of
His pedagogical experience began as an Art and
Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP,
Descriptive Geometry teacher in the metropolitan
1992), where he is currently the director and
area of Lisbon (Cacém, Chelas) between 1996-
senior lecturer of Communication, Photography
1999. From 1999 till 2010 he was a Teaching
and Multimedia (CFM) and Computer Architecture
Assistant at the Drawing curricular unit of the
Aided Design (CAAD). He is also the coordinator
Department of Architecture of the FCTUC. He
of the research group CCRE integrated in FAUP’s
is in charge of Desenho II and Desenho III and
I&D center. He holds a Master Degree in Urban
Arte e Cultura Moderna graduate classes.
Environment Planning and Design (FAUP, 1997)
He concluded his Phd in 2010 with the dissertation
109
flash
"A arquitectura na sua ausência" (Architecture in its
Association in the area of documentary
absence), where he discussed para-architectonic
photography, where she works architecture,
spatial practices as an artistic phenomenon that
landscape and territory. She has participated
became prevalent in Early Modernism (1916-
in collective and individual exhibitions.
1930) and developed into a focused item of postconceptual and post-medium contemporary
Silke Koch, born in 1964, Leipzig, Germany, like
art practices. He did his Master in Art Theories
many others of her generation, experienced life
with a research on Portuguese contemporary
in a new reality after the Berlin Wall came down
painter Jorge Pinheiro (1931) which reflected
in 1989. Symbols, heroes, political systems and
upon the development of anti-narrative and
even simple dichotomies of "good or evil" lost their
formalist pictorial images in the Portuguese
meanings or became contradictory and paradoxical
artistic context of twentieth century late sixties
as new perceptions evolved regarding culture and
and early seventies; this thesis dealt also with
politics. This was also an exciting starting point
the French based genealogy of Portuguese 1940
for Koch, who first embarked on her studies at
and 1950s geometrical and abstract painting and
the Leipzig School of Art only in 1993, graduating
the structuralist ideology behind this particular
in 1998, and sealing it with a master-degree in
artist's concept of opticality (FBAUL, 2002).
2003 with Prof. Astrid Klein as her mentor.
Sandra Teixeira, attending the Master in Audiovisual
Susana Ventura Architect, curator, writer and
Communication, specialization in Cinema and
post-doctoral researcher in Theory of Architecture
Documentary Photography at ESMAD. She has
and Aesthetics (Philosophy). Currently, she is
done several training related to photography,
developing a post-doctoral project “Towards an
from workshops in Manual Binding, Cyanotype
intensive architecture: how to compose sensations
or in Photo Revelation. Has done artistic
in architecture,” at The Faculty of Architecture of
residencies in Póvoa de Varzim and in
the University of Porto (FAUP). Within this project,
Melgaço, which is incorporated in the
she was awarded with the Fernando Távora
International Documentary Film Festival – Filmes
Prize, in 2014. She holds a PhD in Philosophy
do Homem. Doing work for musicians and
(Aesthetics) from the Faculty of Social and Human
other institutions as a freelancer and is, at the
Sciences of Nova University Lisbon (FCSH-UNL,
moment, a trainee at the Cityscopio - Cultural
2013), under scientific supervision of José Gil, a
110
renown philosopher, with the thesis Architecture's
narratives. He moved to São Paulo in 2013, where he
Body without Organs, which included research
started to develop a research focused on Brazilian
residences at the architecture studios of Diller
and Latin American photobooks. In 2014 he founded
Scofidio + Renfro (New York), Lacaton & Vassal
the Trama, a discussion group on photography
(Paris) and Peter Zumthor (Haldenstein), and for
books based in São Paulo, which organizes
which she has received a four year PhD grant
meetings and workshops at Latin American events
provided by FCT, Portuguese Foundation for
and festivals. Between 2014 and 2015 he developed
Science and Technology (2007-2011). She is also
a research on Brazilian photographic publications
an Architect Graduated from Coimbra University
gathering a collection of more than 150 titles for
(darq – FCTUC, 2003). In 2014, she integrated the
the exhibition "Fotos Contam Fatos" at Galeria
Official Portuguese Representation at the 14th
Vermelho in São Paulo with curator Denise Gadelha.
Venice Architecture Biennale. She curated (with
Since 2016, he has directed the study group
Maria Rita Pais and Rita Dourado) “Habitar Portugal
Lombada, a follow-up laboratory for photovoltaic
2009/2011” (“Inhabiting Portugal 2009/2011”), a
projects in the OAS Space of Art. He works as an
selection of the best works of architecture built
independent editor for Brazilian and international
between 2009 – 2011 by Portuguese Architects
authors, contributing to the conceptualization and
(an event provided by the Portuguese Architects
edition of more than ten titles in the last two years.
Association), and currently she is a co-curator
From his research on photo books, hybrids in visual
for “Utopia / Dystopia II,” at the Museum for
narratives and storytelling strategies, he created
Art, Architecture and Technology of Lisbon
The Rising Card, a deck of cards with tips and
(MAAT). She is also a member of the current
exercises to help the authors in the editing process.
editorial team of “Journal Arquitectos” (JA) of the Portuguese Architects Association (2016-2018). Walter Costa, is graduated in International Relations at the University of Bologna (Italy). Entered in the universe of photography in 2009 at the Blank Paper Escuela de Fotografía in Madrid, Spain, where after taking his Master in Project Development he turned his interests specifically to the book and the visual
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NEXT EDITIONS
next editions and international photography contests Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries is the main theme of the current cycle of scopio Magazine. The present issue Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries: City is the title for the second of the 3 different but interrelated categories that integrate the cycle, Architecture, City and Territory. Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries focuses on diverse countries and on how architecture is transformed, how it reflects different hybrid cultural identities in many countries and how all of this interacts with and affects our cities and the landscape, always bearing in mind the mentioned categories: Architecture, City and Territory. Thus, we are interested in photography and in projects that may reveal the multiple layers of history embedded in the architecture of cities from different parts of the world, showing how these cities are in constant evolution and how they define new forms of occupation of the available territory. We are also interested in understanding how social, economic and political systems and values affect the territory and its cities, as well as the way people live and work on those places. Some questions of interest that can be taken on board are: Differences and affinities between country of origin and the new country of emigration, exploring diverse perspectives and deconstructing biased ideas; issues related with the relocation of people from one place to another within each country and at an inter-regional level, along with the consequences of it all; the achievements, aims and hopes of numerous people and how they are reflected in the lives and architecture of many cities; how immigrants or minorities and their dreams are symbolised and perceived in several countries with different values and how the former are assimilated; to question our cultures’ values and desires and the particular features of place and cities in several countries; explore the crossing boarders and shifting boundaries of several dimensions in life – social, psychological, economical, and others alike – and how they are symbolised in the architecture and urban space of different cities.
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Taking into account the encouraging development that scopio Magazine has achieved until now, as well as the interest and significant body of work coming from its Editors and Collaborators, the Editorial and Advisory Board of this publication has decided to adopt a new structure, thus the next edition of scopio Magazine, titled Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries: Territory, there will be several separate and autonomous volumes, being the publication scopio Magazine Viewfinder one of them, which will have a revitalised Editorial board that will share the coordination of Viewfinder with research group CCRE-CEAU-FAUP and will be also available in digital format online. This means that next Viewfinder will integrate in this contest universities and departments related to photography linked to Art and Architecture of international scope. It is proposed that the responsibility of its Editorial and Advisory Board will belong to both CCRE / CEAU / FAUP and UniMAD / P.PORTO R&Ds and that the publication will have 5 Editors: Inaki Bergera - School of Architecture in Zaragoza -, Marco Iuliano - School of Architecture in Liverpool -, which are already both research members of CEAU . FAUP, Mark Durden – USW -, Olivia da Silva - ESMAD / UniMAD / P.PORTO – and Pedro Leão Neto – CCRE/CEAU/FAUP. The objectives of this contest are the strengthening of photography as an inquisitive instrument for architecture, searching for new talents and awareness towards photography and architecture both in Portugal and abroad, and moreover to raise a wider appreciation of our architectural, cultural and intellectual inheritance and promote the photography platform scopio Network. This site shall also be used to publish the projects within the contest. In doing this we are offering more autonomy and publication space for the editorial content of Viewfinder that reveals new talents and awareness towards photography and architecture, city and territory universes both in Portugal and abroad, recognizing that past published photography projects have significantly captured the interest of both specialised and general public and also building new collaborations giving more freedom and responsibility to their Editors with the objective of creating increased synergies with them. Thus, scopio Magazine Viewfinder will be from now on an autonomous publication, in the same way that are scopio Magazine Curator or scopio Magazine Addendum, and will be published annually and linked to scopio Magazines global theme crossing borders, shifting boundaries, which is a subject that allows to understand how different disciplines or fields of practice use photography as an instrument of evidence, expression and inquiry, between documentation and art, as also how photography can establish a bridge between these different areas of interest and study. This means exploring the concept of crossing and erecting borders over
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NEXT EDITIONS
different fields of study and practices with the intent of presenting a broad understanding about these issues linking them to photography image, art and architecture in order to question our cultures’ values and desires and the specific characteristics of places, buildings and how people appropriate and live in these built spaces. Published separately, with its own ISSN and in a date of the year that may be different from the other scopio magazine publications of the same cycle, Viewfinder wants to contribute to raise a wider appreciation of our architectural, city and territory cultural and intellectual inheritance and promote the photography universe. Thus, in the next edition, titled scopio Magazine Viewfinder: Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries - Territory, the primarily focus will be on the subject of residential spaces, public spaces, urban scattered communities and city life in general. It will try to show works that characterise the rich multifaceted world of contemporary cities and / or non traditional urban communities regarding immigrants or minorities’ different types of blocks, neighbourhoods, cultural diversity and values expressed in various types of residential and public spaces. Among other things, it is about looking at architectural spaces and their many signs, which reveal the values, customs and culture of the people who live there. In fact, the aim is to show a varied set of works capable of providing a creative and significant body of evidence as regards to the diversity and richness of our cities’ architecture and life. In addition, it will focus on how the cities contribute to structure and characterise the territory and are responsible for order and disorder applied to urban and territorial issues. Moreover, there will be an interest in work that explores how cities and other natural systems as rivers, seas, forests and other alike have been in interaction and characterize the territory in terms of spatial morphology and geographical features. All this will contribute to understand how social, economic and political systems and values affect the way territories evolve and are categorized. We will be announcing our two different but related photography contests in each issue of scopio Magazine Viewfinder and through its internet platform scopionetwork: scopio International Photography Contest and scopio International Photobook Contest. SCOPIO International Photography Contest is designed to encourage the creation of an interesting photography series of no more than 10 images, with a descriptive memory not exceeding 2000 characters. This means working with a concept and defining it visually through the photographic process, thus creating a series of images related to one another. However, the relatedness is best achieved by a cumulative effect rather than the order in which the images are presented.
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SCOPIO International Photobook Contest, as the name implies, is directed towards the creation of an Artist Photobook, which also involves the visual definition of a concept. Nevertheless, the focus is now on creating a narrative, of no less than 20 images with a descriptive memory of 1500 words, assuming that by presenting a story the reader will be pulled in and “entertained”. In this case, an image is linked with the next one at a fundamental, conceptual and emotional level, increasing the reader’s attention to the work in order to figure out what those connections are. Our aim is to reveal the potential of the photobook as a mature medium capable of communicating different perspectives and of combining diverse art expressions to convey in a unique way the rich multi-layered contemporary issues related to architecture, city spaces and the territory where people live and work. In this sense, we are accepting entries of small limited editions of Artist Photobooks or Dummies, as long as they follow the regulations and the publishing disclosure rights of the contest. Both contests will follow scopio’s major theme but they are different, autonomous and with different deadlines. In each issue, we shall announce the theme for both contests, thus giving new authors better opportunities to present projects that may add richness to the contents of that theme. It will also be possible for authors to participate and register projects before the deadline of the contest. Accordingly, the forthcoming scopio International Photography Contest and scopio International Photobook Contest will both have as theme “Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries: Territory”. Next Contests: “scopio International Photography Contest - Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries: Territory” Deadline for entries: September 15 – 2018 Rules available at www.scopiomagazine.com or submit request by email to contest@ cityscopio.com “scopio International Photobook Contest - Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries: City” Deadline for entries: September 15 – 2018 Rules available at www.narrativecontest.cityscopio.com or submit request by email to contest@cityscopio.com
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EMERGENT PHOTOGRAPHERS
The aim is to disseminate and bring to light telling work of emergent or young photographers
Jion Kiim Maia, Portugal (2018)
EMERGENT PHOTOGRAPHERS
Cityscopio Cultural Association: always with Architecture, Art and Photography
Sandra Teixeira Maia, Portugal (2018)
The unconscious rhythms of reality or how images will never give us back what we never had By Pedro Pousada Photography original ethos, capturing the past tense, making it a renewed experience, a renewed system of pain and “mortality” (as described by Susan Sontag), has become our intranscendent non-teleological skin, a psychologically charged skin that envelops us in suspension of disbelief but also hesitation. Yet in the age of digitization, of artificial intelligence, of animatronics and immersive virtual reality, photography ceased to empower us with the experience of by gone space-time. Yes, light graphing motion, bringing into a still what is active and alive remains a premonition of the present that was lost, forever, in the past. But the mimetic drive, the nostalgia of the lookalike and also of metamorphosis (how subjects were, those we never knew and those we knew, the instant of change and loss) all this does not surprise us anymore; instead it has become an expected, behavioural intuition in our contemporary relationship with life; we expect (and dread) that images will tell us about our precarious connection with otherness, with what one could call the immersiveness of the self in the contradictions and flows of daily life. I will forward a good fictional example: Bertolt Brecht’s metaphor for Adolf Hitler, Arturo Ui, the Chicago gangster turned into a political decision maker; in a specific moment of the drama he walks in a bizarre rehearsed way in front of his crime partner to his surprise and discomfort; he tells him that he wants to look modern and, unknowingly he mirrors the montage nature and scheming hypocrisy of modernity (noteworthy, modernity, in Brecht’s call, is essentialism becoming image commodification becoming style becoming fascism) and by doing so he becomes a philosophical problem; so Arturo Ui’s redefinition as body and appearance - in his case for political and social mobility purposes- has turned, today, in consumer media based societies, into our categorization of being human but this is far from an hegemonic condition (and barbarism still unfolds in this equation of aesthetics, economic organization
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and annihilation through consumer encouragement). But, notwithstanding, our departure from the brutalized gesture of organic, omnivorous form, our departure from humans as nature is irreversible...and images tell us that everyday...we are no longer natural, authentic, we are objectified images that consume in a bulimic way more images and this is something that produces itself before intersubjectiveness (dialogue, communication,) arrives into the foreground. This is the core of José Maçãs de Carvalho selection of photographs: there is no promise or surge of metaphysical redemption in the accumulation of nonsensical daily laconic picturization of life but in this atmosphere of dispossession, of architectural abstraction, of outdated kitsch plastered Michael Jackson’s, of terrain vague and corporate buildings one senses that nanochronology has become the true scale of our relationship with photographic but also cinematic imagery, bringing the survival of experience to a world that no longer belongs to visible reality. And we are changed by this crude awareness that the tension between conscience and totality (what we are able to grasp of infinity) is not resolved by the accumulation of images. One has to solve this problem alone: images are necessary for us to act upon the idea of cosmos but at the same time they delay the condensation of that idea. José Maçãs de Carvalho photography put us in front of this dilemma: we want images as storytelling, as truth and falsehood, as mutation and crystallization, we want them to give us the unseen, the void within excess, the absent. We want them as devices that bring us the “what if” of our body, sensorial experience, but they cannot. José Maçãs knows that images are depleted of reality, of experience and they are not expected to reconnect with it only to enhance the lack, the biochemical, psychoanalytic, physiological need of human beings to overcome the inhibitions of the pragmatic world.
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José Maçãs de Carvalho portfolio has also an affectionate almost philological close “reading” of the singular and the plural, of light and darkness and this is done through a formal approach where posture (individuals standing isolated on photography or sport contraptions) and wait (Lenin’s statue iconizing the lost world of socialism, the asian girls held up next to the painted onlooker and reframed by it) become the scaffolds of a talkative text about the nonhistorical passage of time. And as betrayed lovers these photographs ask me how many remote, anonymous, fragmented identities have I consumed, absorbed, ignored, introspected and ruined today, just before staring at them and starting these lines? And how many more did I embed in my imagination as I closed the text? They know that my perception is not pure, is not neutral and that their integrity is always, necessarily, doomed.
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Essay for Atlas #1 (1988_2016)_José Maçãs de Carvalho By José Maçãs de Carvalho In recent years, I have been working on my photographic archive having in mind Aby Warburg’s “Mnemosyne”project. I have tried to prove the hypothesis of images activating new meanings in the (physical) proximity to other images, losing its unicity and, thus, getting a relational and expansive sense. I´m also talking about the duality of image, about its capacity to refer to a distant meaning field. For Warburg, the image has an energy that can renew itself when it meets others, at history’s present, polarising itself in different, or even disjunctive, meanings and relations. “…the past isn’t an eternal stamp of the image, but it will always be crossed and placed in game by the fight between opposing forces”, explains António Guerreiro1, thus granting the image this power of getting into the present, in an approximation to the “dialectical image” (Walter Benjamim), that states itself against the linear and continuous history, and sets up now, activating remembrance, shattering temporality into a fresh process for the image, or providing actuality in the clash with the present. This silent rendezvous between us now and between us past is always done with photographic images and it is in the collision (of images from the past that lie in the archive) with our present that a new meaning (that was asleep) comes to stage. Thus, the dialectical image can be the consequence of the remembrance process.
1 Guerreiro, António (2012), “ O Pathosformel e a imagem dialéctica: correspondências entre Warburg e Benjamim”, in Anabel Mendes (org.), “Qual o tempo e o movimento de uma elipse? Estudos sobre Warburg”, Lisboa: Universidade Católica Editora, 2012, pág. 76.
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José Maçãs de carvalho "jf", 100cm x 132 cm, 2016
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (airport#1 ), 70cm x 100cm, 2006
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled, (disc#3), 100cm x 135cm, 2009
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (bouguereau), 70cm x 150cm, 2016
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (mj), 90 cm x 120cm, 2016
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (hsbc#1), 90cm x 120cm, 2011
José Maçãs de carvalho "jg", 90 cm x 120 cm, 2016
José Maçãs de carvalho "rx", 90 cm x 120 cm, 2011
José Maçãs de carvalho "vl", 120 cm x 90 cm, (1992), 2014
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (carro#3), 90 cm x 120cm, (2009), 2018
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (porto interior#1), 90 cm x 120 cm, (1995), 2014
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (moto#1), 72 cm x 104 cm (1995), 2014
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (sandy),104 cm x 72 cm, (1985), 2014
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (moto #2), 80 cm x 110 cm, (1998), 2014
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (moto #3), 80 cm x 110 cm, (1998), 2014
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (telefone #1), 80 cm x 110 cm, (1998), 2014
José Maçãs de carvalho "coffee shop", 90 cm x 120 cm, (1991), 2017
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (arcada #1), 72 cm x 104 cm, (1991), 2018
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (arcada #2), 72 cm x 104 cm, (1991), 2018
José Maçãs de carvalho "up street", 80 cm x 110 cm, (1996), 2016
José Maçãs de carvalho "polaroid", 80 cm x 110 cm, (1996), 2016
José Maçãs de carvalho Untitled (nz#1), 72 cm x 104 cm, 2016
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