SCOPIO MAGAZINE ARCHITECTURE, ART AND IMAGE
SCOPIO Architecture, Art and Image Journal is an open access, annual, peer-reviewed journal that aims to offer critical, explorative and informative text around the universe of AAI. It aims to provide a space for debating and (re)thinking Architecture, Art and Image in contemporaneity with a significant multi-disciplinarity and interdisciplinary approach.
Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto
The text reflects on the experience of participating in Lukas Sander’s video walk, comparing it to the childhood game “Blind Man’s Bluff.” In the game, being blindfolded transforms familiar surroundings into an unstable and disorienting landscape where the central question shifts from “Where are the others?” to “Where am I?” The author argues that Sander’s work induces a similar disorientation, paradoxically enacted “with open eyes.” Guided solely by a disembodied voice through headphones, the participant navigates urban and semi-hidden spaces, experiencing uncertainty, vulnerability, and a regression to a childlike state of dependence and unsteady movement. The loss of auditory self-awareness intensifies the destabilisation, prompting even attempts to record one’s own footsteps as a form of reassurance or self-preservation. Throughout the walk, reality becomes ambiguous: sounds blur between environment and recording; spaces feel at once familiar and estranged. By the time the participant returns to the starting point, the landscape is unchanged, yet the experience has altered the self. The text thus explores how Sander’s work transforms perception, orientation and identity through deliberate sensory displacement.
FEATURED TEXTS, RESEARCH PAPERS OR PROJECTS | Editors Ana Miriam Rebelo, Maria Neto
Featured Texts, Research papers or Projects
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Open Call – International Drawing and Photography Contest (DPIC): Utopia 500 | Space and Identity of the Universities
We are currently in the fourth edition (2025) of the International Drawing and Photography Contest (DPIc), a competition integrated in scopio Magazine Architecture, Art and Image publication being directed towards the Identity of Universities spaces of teaching experience and work and open to all academic communities, both in Portugal and abroad.
DRAWING AND PHOTOGRAPHY INTERNATIONAL CONTEST
The 2025 edition of the Drawing and Photography International Contest (DPIc) | Space and Identity of Universities again revealed the expressive breadth and conceptual richness that characterise this initiative. The Jury’s collective assessment highlighted how this year’s submissions explored contrasting visions—ranging from subtle utopian transformations to incisive dystopian critiques—while interrogating the social, political and spatial realities of contemporary academic environments. Just as in previous editions, the projects that obtained the highest scores distinguished themselves by achieving a dynamic equilibrium between conceptual clarity, critical reflection and the strength of their visual representation. Yet, what particularly marked the 2025 call was the tension between discreet, almost imperceptible gestures and radical, provocative interventions—a tension that many jury members described as both poetic and politically resonant. (...)
The work forwards an aesthetic and sensory reflection concerning the presence of trees in our contemporary landscapes, namely in urban contexts, conceiving them as "visual thought." Their materiality, mutability, and imagistic charge shape the individual and collective experience of places, transforming the perception and experience of space. The project starts by observing the differences between spaces inhabited by trees and those whose absence is noted, exploring at the same time the implications of this presence in constructing the urban imaginary. The work falls under the theme "Exploring Contemporary Realities," articulating an artistic journey and a theoretical essay anchored in photographic representation as a research tool. In addition to photography, audiovisual and sound capture are used, exploring the relationship between still images, moving images, and sounds, in a synesthetic approach that prioritises the perception and affective experience of the landscape. The research focuses on the changing effects caused by trees: the visual impermanence generated by light and wind, tonal and chromatic variations, the metamorphosis of shadows, the movement of leaves and trunks, and the sounds of other living beings that inhabit them. These elements will be collected and analysed in a dynamic between sound and silence, noise and natural melody, allowing for the creation of visual and sound compositions, eventually integrated into installations. Inspired by Aby Warburg and his expression "the external cause of the image", where wind is a vehicle of emotion and pathos, the essay proposes an approach in which the body, in interaction with the landscape, actively participates in the redefinition of places. Accordingly, the sensitive mediation between body and space becomes the core of an artistic process, and by doing so, it reveals the uniqueness of trees as agents of transformation and meaning in the contemporary urban environment. Cover image: “Untitled"
The resonance of abandonment: visiting, photographing, and filming the Vilnius Sports Palace
The Sporto rūmai, the Vilnius Sports Palace, is an indoor arena in Vilnius, Lithuania built in 1971 and a remarkable example of brutalist architecture. The arena was closed in 2008 for safety reasons. Plans to renovate the building have so far failed leaving the site as a modern ruin. In my visual art practice, I engage with modern urban space, looking for and exploring sites that resonate with collective memory and utopian promise. I use, and experiment with, audiovisual documentation of these sites. Cities and architecture are experienced perceptually – how we see and hear and how we move through them. My attraction for the Vilnius Sports Palace stems from what I see as its resonant qualities. It demands our attention, but we are not sure why. This resonance is expressed by the site’s own vulnerability as a tragic ruin or an abandoned opportunity for community participation. It also resonates through the visitor who might be sensitive to the Palace’s architectural and social potential seemingly rendered obsolete. The uncanny familiarity of the structure leaves the visitor uncertain in what they might consider meaningful in their experience of the site. This essay reflects on a photo and video exploration during which I captured and recorded digitally the site of the Palace. These files are inscriptions of the visual, aural and temporal presence of the site at two moments in time (in 2012 and 2023). They capture moments of the changing site in the recent past that will resonate into the future. Cover image: “Sporto rūmai, the Vilnius Sports Palace"
unfinished is an artistic project, a site-specific video walk created for the newly built district of Manegg in Zurich, Switzerland. Co-produced with Gessnerallee Zurich, the work premiered in May and June 2024, with further presentations anticipated in 2025. The project centres on a single-shot, steadycam video that traces a continuous walking route through the evolving urban landscape. Audience members receive the video on tablets and, equipped with headphones, follow the filmed path on location, synchronised in movement, position, and perspective with the onscreen walker. The site—Manegg—is a recently developed district on the grounds of a former paper factory, now demolished and replaced by mixed-use residential and commercial buildings. Marketed as “Greencity”, this territory presents a still-emerging, ecologically branded urban environment, shaped by corporate narratives of sustainability. The film draws on in-depth research and interviews with residents and planners, offering commentary on the space’s material, aesthetic, and socio-ecological textures. Through voiceover and image, it constructs a reflective and at times spectral narrative, layering memory, presence, and potential futures. By integrating archival imagery and animation, the film envisions past industrial functions alongside speculative projections of urban transformation. The soundscape heightens the immersive experience, inviting a critical reading of the processes of urban development. unfinished positions Zurich-Manegg as a case study of peripheral expansion in European cities, revealing how contemporary architecture often generates generic environments driven by corporate logics. The project remains open-ended, inviting new modes of seeing and inhabiting spaces in flux.
AN ETHICS OF SEEING: Utopian Readings of Gerda Taro’s PhotoScapes
This paper explores the intersections of photography, ethics, and utopian thought through a critical reading of Gerda Taro’s photographic work during the Spanish Civil War. It positions Taro’s images as complex photoscapes—visual fields where political struggle, human suffering, and aspirations for a transformed future coexist. The study begins with a historical framing of Taro’s life, her collaboration with Robert Capa, and the socio-political urgency of documenting war in the 1930s. This contextualisation grounds the discussion in both the material realities of conflict and the symbolic power of photography to shape collective memory. Drawing on philosophical and critical theory, the paper situates photography within traditions of utopian thinking and ethical vision. It considers how images can act as ethical interventions—calling viewers to respond to injustice—while acknowledging the tensions between representation, truth, and political action. This theoretical framework enables a dual reading of Taro’s work as both hopeful and cautionary, revealing the ambivalent nature of visual testimony in times of crisis. Two case study analyses follow. The first examines hopeful photoscapes, where Taro’s compositions convey solidarity, resilience, and the possibility of a different future. Here, the imagery transcends documentation to propose alternative social imaginaries, foregrounding the agency of those photographed. The second considers dystopian photoscapes, where the devastation and loss captured by Taro confront the viewer with the fragility of such hopes. These images resist romanticisation, instead demanding an ethical reckoning with violence, displacement, and the erosion of ideals. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the political legacy of Taro’s work, not only as a historical record but as an enduring prompt for ethical and imaginative engagement. Her photographs are read as sites where past struggles resonate with contemporary urgencies, challenging viewers to envision just futures while confronting the realities that threaten them. By holding utopian and dystopian readings in productive tension, this study proposes an “ethics of seeing” that remains open-ended—recognising that the meanings of such images continue to shift with time, context, and the interpretive work of their audiences. Cover page: Femme militaire s’entrainant sur la plage, environs de Barcelone - aout 1936 (public domain: Wikipedia)
Drawing and photography international contest (DPIC)
The first edition of the DPIc international contest, Architecture, Art and Image – Utopia 500, was held in 2016 and was aimed at 1st, 2nd and 3rd Cycle students and young researchers from any higher education or research institution. Since its first edition, DPIc has shown an enormous capacity to capture the interest of a significant number of students from different countries and fields of study as a result of the collaboration between the Centre for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism of U.Porto’s Faculty of Architecture (CEAU/ FAUP) and the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies of U.Porto’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities (CETAPS/FLUP). At present, the scopio Magazine AAI publication integrates the International Drawing and Photography Contest (DPIc) – Architecture, Art and Image – UTOPIA, interconnecting the universes of Architecture, Art and Image with the Utopian desire for a better world and for spaces that provide a better quality of life. Important ideas present in the DPIc are opening the Universities to the Civil Society through diverse submitted projects, showcasing the multifaceted richness of activities, experiences and architectures. The DPIc call focuses on the theme of “Utopia” and invites participants from the realms of Architecture, Art, and Image to submit two distinctive images: one portraying a critical representation of an existing space and another presenting an idealized, utopian vision of the same space. The objective is to provide innovative solutions to the issues identified in the initial depiction. The highlight of the call is the identity of university spaces, encompassing teaching and work environments and their connection with the surrounding cities. This call was open to academic communities, both domestically in Portugal and internationally, and while individual applications were accepted, the contest strongly encouraged the formation of multidisciplinary teams. Deadline for the submission of projects: 31 of December, 2025.
Negative Space and Electric Traces examines the photographic negative both as a technical process and as a broader cultural metaphor. Inverting tone and colour, the negative evokes ideas from mathematics, physics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, resonating strongly within the visual arts. Bruna Sirgado’s work explores this inversion by transforming images of nature—plants, textures, landscapes—into luminous, otherworldly forms that suggest hidden energies and invite new perspectives on the natural world. Janine Oliveira’s Revive the Electricity focuses on abandoned industrial sites between Tomar and Leiria, employing the “American night” technique to isolate objects once central to electrical power. Her harshly lit images metaphorically revive these forgotten spaces, casting electricity as both memory and life force. Polytechnic Institute of Tomar
In Place: Visual Narratives of Immobility and Isolation
In Place: Visual Narratives of Immobility and Isolation gathers four student projects that revisit private and archival photographs to reflect on memory, identity, and spatial belonging. Developed during the pandemic, Francisco Oliveira’s Casa das Águas traces the Cáster River’s springs, blending personal exploration with local history. Guided by oral testimony, his photographic sequence culminates at the Casa das Águas, a site once central to Santa Maria da Feira’s water distribution. Jessica Teixeira’s Retratos da Memória confronts family history through portraits of her mother, reinterpreted in light of dementia. By symbolically destroying and reworking these photographs, she translates the fragility of memory and the erosion of self-recognition into visual form. Jorge Marques’ Camuflagem begins with a found rural photograph and evolves into digitally manipulated landscapes that resist geographical or temporal fixing, questioning the stability of territory and belonging. Finally, Mariana Vilanova’s project turns her lens toward Porto’s ilhas, modest workers’ housing now threatened by gentrification. Her distant, anonymous images of daily life in these spaces highlight both continuity and loss, exposing the pressures of tourism and real estate on the city’s social fabric. Together, these works explore photography’s role in reactivating memory, transforming place, and narrating conditions of isolation and displacement Faculty of Enginering of the University of Porto
The Photographic Image: Memory, History, and Identity in Artistic Expression
The Photographic Image: Memory, History, and Identity in Artistic Expression presents four projects exploring photography’s role in shaping narratives of self and community. Gonçalo Estevão reflects on queer visibility through cinematic references to Xavier Dolan, while Inês Leal reconfigures archival images of the Pejão Mines to address memory and sociopolitical identity. João Bernardo documents Serra da Estrela’s ageing communities in A Dança dos Mosquitos, blending ethnography and film. Raul Macedo’s Hummin’ that old distant melody captures fleeting urban moments as introspective reflections. Together, these works highlight photography’s power to mediate between history, identity, and artistic expression. Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto
This essay highlights the photographic experimentation of Carolina Lino and Luca Zangrandi, whose projects reflect the diversity of artistic approaches cultivated at the Faculty of Fine Arts. Lino, trained in Painting and holding a Postgraduate Diploma in Contemporary Photography Discourses, presents A escrita que nasce, where drawing and writing merge through natural metamorphic processes. Her work evokes Walter Benjamin’s “optical unconscious,” revealing a poetic vegetal script in which light inscribes thought and perception. Zangrandi, a Multimedia Art student, explores photo-chemical processes in Remains of a Portrait, producing chemigrams that analogise bodily metamorphosis with photographic transformation. Through the interplay of developer, fixer, and light, his images evoke portraits in continuous states of becoming. Both artists foreground photography’s experimental dimension, situated within the Faculty as a speculative laboratory bridging artistic disciplines and expanding the medium’s possibilities beyond digital certainty. Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon
Photography as a cognitive instrument for (re)discovering architectural and social realities
This essay presents the pedagogical approach to photography at FAUP, where teaching is closely aligned with research, fostering students’ critical, independent thought and ability to articulate it through photographic narratives. The projects address architectural and social realities, engaging with political, economic, and cultural contexts while balancing realism and abstraction. Parque Residencial da Boavista reinterprets Porto’s 1970s housing through Italo Calvino’s fictional city of Valdrada, blending influences from Hanzlová and Gursky. Identity explores the São João de Deus neighbourhood through walking as a method of inquiry, evoking influences from the Düsseldorf school and Wim Wenders. Decoupage examines Bom Sucesso’s human presence, echoing Aalto’s humanism and Ribeiro’s focus on lived space. Transições reflects on Siza’s Bouça neighbourhood, integrating architecture, light, and everyday life. Collectively, these projects reveal photography as a cognitive tool for (re)discovering urban and social realities. Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto
(re)discovering architectural and social realities
Theories and practices that mutually stimulate one another
This essay highlights photographic projects developed within the Bachelor’s and Master’s programs in Photography and Cinema, reflecting the tension between theory and the experiential “eroticism” of practice, as noted by Susan Sontag and Henk Borgdorff. Ari Mouroa and Teresa Ribeiro’s Impressions documents elderly participants from the Senior University of Vila das Aves, exploring shared learning and memory. Emanuel Constantino’s De Zhejiang investigates the industrial community of Varziela, evoking a sense of estrangement between people, buildings, and landscape. Felícia Oliveira’s Sem Passado engages with archival traces of abandoned children in Porto’s Casa da Roda, transforming memory objects into visual testimony. Natalia Perulero’s Quemadura experiments with photography’s elemental materials—light and time—balancing figuration and abstraction. Together, these works reveal photography’s critical, poetic, and transformative possibilities. School of Media, Arts and Design, Póvoa de Varzim and Vila do Conde
Interelationship of theories and practices
At a time when the production of images is undergoing yet another profound transformation
At a time when the production of images is undergoing yet another profound transformation, certainly the biggest since the emergence of photography, it is precisely in this field and the issues intrinsic to its expansion and questioning that we will find Elisa Vieira’s proposals. For Vieira, this questioning also involves incorporating the social dimension of the sacred, understood from a perspective of temporal depth: using the history of representation itself, through and in images, the author starts from the canonical use of the portrait and its printing on fabric to test it here in the photographic field, working on the limits of photography in this operation, in a logic of challenging the unifying and reproductive nature of the format, in the institution of the hyperrealistic world that constitutes our present. In Valéria Martins’s case, the field of subjective and collective memory is referenced and crossed by the agility and speed of moving images. In this work, they are made known through a homely and objectively carefree register, in a parallel position to the current torrent of images from the intimate confessional plane, which, due to their profusion, professionalism and canon, merge into each other and tend to disappear in a logic of consumption quickly. In a movement that incorporates and affirms another intelligence and will, Martins’ work naturally dialogues with this type of register and speed typical of his generation, but manages to impose on them a celebratory, open dimension capable of inscribing in this project its critical dimension and its life as a sequence of safe and careful images, precisely because they are authorial. Porto Artistic School
A continuous, diversified and sustained photographic practice
This essay examines three photographic projects that reflect diverse approaches to territory, identity, and memory. In Da Pedra ao Osso, João Ramilo explores the ontological meaning of place through his home village of Louriceira, addressing themes of disappearance, change, and nostalgia in the rural world. José Miguel Ribeiro’s Na Cratera do Vulcão, grounded in Paulo Valverde’s ethnographic notes on São Tomé and Príncipe, engages with the coexistence of the living and the dead, using photography to probe the spectral boundaries between visibility and invisibility, material and immaterial. Finally, Luísa Fernandes’ Para Além da Forma challenges stereotypical and sexualised representations of the LGBTIQ+ community, creating a space for self-expression and recognition. Together, these projects highlight the vitality of contemporary photographic practice as reflection and critique of society’s turbulence. School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University
FO:RCE _ Photography: Reflection, Creation and Teaching
This essay presents four final-year undergraduate photography projects developed within the Contrast project (2022–23). The works explore themes of identity, memory, family, fragility, and archives through distinct approaches: André Paulino’s Kaus, a multimedia exploration of psychological states; Beatriz Pilré’s Elos, a reimagining of family traditions and female lineage; Duarte Manhita’s 01.C.18, a cinematic study of hidden hospital spaces; and Maria Judas’s Searching in the Chest of Affection, a poetic reflection on childhood and growth. Together, these projects highlight the value of tutorial-based pedagogy in fostering individual creativity, turning limitations into opportunities for authorial exploration. Department of Cinema and Media Arts, School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies, Lusófona University of Humanities and Technologies, Lisbon
Photography as a Language:Between Concept and Expression
It is with great satisfaction that we present this editorial for the third volume of the CONTRAST collection, a collaborative project centred around the universe of Photography, Creation, and Education, intersecting with the multidisciplinary fields of Architecture, Art, and Design1. We aim to highlight the richness and importance of this project within the interdisciplinary context of higher education in Photography. Furthermore, we seek to reveal the potential of photography as an interpretative and expressive tool capable of engaging with diverse realities. The CONTRAST project emerges as a response to the cultural, social, and political transformations of the early 21st century. It is presently focused on fostering a network of artistic collaboration and initiatives between higher education institutions in Portugal, where photography holds a significant presence. One of CONTRAST’s main objectives is thus to promote critical reflection and debate on pressing contemporary issues through photography. In this sense, we are interested in drawing attention to the project’s potential to relate the European Green Deal to everyday realities and thus be aligned with the objectives of the New European Bauhaus. By examining themes such as housing, public spaces, and gender issues, CONTRAST offers an essential insight into the complexities of contemporary societies. It helps to revitalise confidence in the future among diverse audiences, especially younger ones. In this scenario, photography is not just a recording tool but an instrument for analysing, problematising and reinventing visible realities, bringing new insights into city space and life. (...) Cover image: Exhibition of the Contrast project at the Portuguese Centre of Photography (2024)
With this Open Call "Exploring Contemporary Realities", we launched the annual major theme of interest for scopio Magazine AAI – Exploring Contemporary Realities, Volume 2, and initiated a new collaboration with the project Contrast: Multidisciplinary network of artistic initiatives in Art, Architecture, Design and Photography through SCOPIO & CONTRAST International Conference. The call had as responsible Editors academics / artists coming from both scopio Magazine AAI and the Contrast project and this rich editorial team ensured the necessary peer review work through the U. Porto OJS platform. scopio Magazine AAI is, in this way, the official publishing academic periodical for International Conference SCOPIO & CONTRAST and the submissions are both for the Conference and its 2nd volume in partnership with Contrast addressing the theme Exploring Contemporary Realities. Scopio Magazine AAI is transitioning to continuous publication to better align with the dynamics of Open Access electronic publishing, moving away from the constraints of its previous model geared towards traditional print formats. This shift aims to expedite the dissemination of research to the community, offering immediate benefits to both readers and authors by ensuring quicker access to new findings. The adoption of a continuous publication strategy enhances the open review process by reducing the time from submission to publication and by boosting the visibility of individual contributions, thus fostering greater engagement and dissemination within the scholarly community. This means that submissions that are accepted after peer review are released online for open review and once the issue is complete, the submissions receive traditional consecutive page numbering as part of the annual issue/volume that is then complete and released. "Exploring Contemporary Realities" aimed to explore the use of photography and other means of visual representation as forms of artistic research, documentation, and analysis of different configurations on the transformation of the physical environment and how it is understood and shaped by a diverse field of study, practices and cultures. This means, besides other things, to better understand through photography and film the relationship between culture and space and explore how culture, beliefs, behaviours, and practices, interacts with and shape the physical environment of different territories and their architectures, cities and landscapes, as well as to acknowledge contemporary discourses and usages of landscape concepts[1]. Social transformations are linked to changes in the inhabited place, and recent history has revealed the speed with which space changes. These transformations have been so radical that regular documentation about the impermanence of the place has become urgent. In fact, places are uncertain spaces and to represent them visually is to preserve their understanding, recent life experiences such as the gentrification of large cities or the health crisis have imposed profound changes on contemporary life models and, consequently, allowed the creation of previously unthinkable photographs. This is where the “Exploring contemporary realities” is located, artistic projects and documentary projects that operate from the expanded field of architecture, art and design from its actual materialization to the experiences of the place; exploring different levels of privacy, scales and urban landscapes. Focusing also on the exploration of the discursive space that operates in broader systems: sociocultural, political, historical and even technical. If we accept the image as a kind of visual language2 , disseminated and received in different geographic points, this call extends this dialogue, opening up to the integration of different looks of cultural identities from other regions, places and countries; the specificity of the place as a way to increase our understanding of society and the territory. The objective is to encourage the use of images for the construction of artistic projects that promote critical views on the transformation of the physical environment as a result of the way they are perceived and experienced in their multiple facets. In summary, the aim is to take advantage of the current role of the image as a way of expanding knowledge with a particular focus on photography, recognized as a privileged means of expression and research for the understanding of architecture and urban landscapes and for the construction of the imaginary; between document and fiction; reproduction and manipulation; analogue and digital visual representation as a means of crossing different disciplines, blurring artistic boundaries. [1] See the discussion of key conceptions of landscape circulating as part of the recent discourse i.e. landscape as a fundamental building block, a communicative medium, and a realm of imaginative constructs." Vera Vicenzotti. "The Landscape of Landscape Urbanism." Landscape Journal 36, no. 1 (2018): 75-86. https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.36.1.75. https://lj.uwpress.org/content/wplj/36/1/75.full.pdf. [2] Nathan Jurgenson - The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media, Verso, 2019, p. 13-14
Oblivion is the disease of memory. As Paul Ricoeur points out, remembering is a form of labour and a duty of memory. Photography, in its essence, is an aid memoire. Whenever we gaze upon images, we are overwhelmed by a whirlwind of seemingly forgotten sensations. Photography serves this process of remembrance and anamnesis effectively, allowing us to update our vision of the past and preventing images from crystallising it. While this memorial aspect of Photography is essential for understanding its evocative and even transformative power, it is equally important to acknowledge the evolution of Photography from the 1970s to the present day. It is worth noting that within the context of the early Modernist Avant-Garde movements, Photography significantly diverged from its social origins and became crucial in many visual experiments during the Constructivist period and early Surrealism. Photography liberated itself from its social function from the 1970s onwards, coexisting with the emergence of the second Avant-Garde movement of the 20th century. At this point, it began to be instrumentalised for practices requiring a lasting medium, such as Performance and Happenings, or, in a more vernacular sense, to express issues subject to sociological or anthropological reception. What is certain is that its importance and freshness emerged within the artistic field, particularly in the realms of the theatricality and fiction. We therefore consider that the starting point for Contemporary Photography lies in this period, with many of the authors who began their careers at that time still actively producing work today. The students’ practical work, which constitutes 75% of their final assessment, is developed over the semester within the framework of two projects. The first focuses on self-portrait, while the second revolves around the idea of appropriation or, alternatively, the development of a visual narrative. Despite its autobiographical definition and affiliation with Art History, self-portrait is understood broadly and diversely. It is always a poetic point of view (that which lies beyond the real), the “self” as “other”, transforming Photography into a field of narrative expression. In the second project, the methodology of appropriation is based on the idea that appropriationist methods define the paradigm of contemporary creation, aligned with acquiring knowledge as the starting point for all learning. The alternative second project fits within a broad field, which can be called domestic or private narratives, favouring a sequential organisation (however paratactic it may be) and the coexistence of images with a relational dynamic that enhances their connection more than the individual value of each image. Eva Postica’s self-portrait work embodies a refined poetic directness but also reflects the strangeness of places, adopting a critical stance in self-representation. Margaux Mazure’s photographs, also in the field of self-representation, possess an atmosphere akin to photo-performance, influenced by modern experiments from Man Ray to André Kertész. Ricardo Almeida’s self-portraits should be viewed as critical gestures of self-representation in suburban public spaces. However, they reveal a very intense chromatic and constructive density that favours the fusion of figure and background. Salomé Monteiro’s appropriation project begins with Jeff Wall’s photograph Insomnia, making a radical shift from the original setting to a public garden. By stripping the work of its depressive character, she updates the everyday gestures and postures of idle life in the garden and daytime sleep. Finally, Sofia Pratas Morais’ work holds narrative potential, wandering through urban spaces that close off to the photographic lens through compositional choices that hint at hesitant exits and reveal a familiar strangeness. Departamento de Arquitetura e Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Faculdade Ciências e Tecnologia, Universidade de Coimbra
The Melancholy of Images: Reassessing the Value of Photography
One of the main questions currently facing the world of image production, particularly in photography, is its relevance—more explicitly, its raison d’être within a landscape marked by total saturation. In a global context where the most widely used device in contemporary societies is the smartphone and where images are predominantly published on social networks—where the vertical format has been adopted to match the standardized scrolling format—photography appears to be experiencing a crisis comparable to that which painting underwent, not when photography was invented, but when image-making became commonplace with pointand- shoot cameras, such as Sony’s 1964 Handycam. A seminal exhibition like The Photographer’s Eye, conceived by John Szarkowski for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966, which juxtaposed vernacular photography with images created by Photographers (with a capital P), would have no place today because the flow of images has exhausted the possibility of judgment. Moreover, the radical democratization of devices precludes any comparative overview, and the field of authorial photography has absorbed all the paraphernalia of technical errors, indecisions, and a vernacular passion that has intensified since the 1950s, from the nomadic gaze of Robert Frank to the conceptual functionality of Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, or Andy Warhol. Curiously, if, in the first instance, the primacy of technology was the response found by authors— whether through the advent of digital media or the possibilities afforded by large-format prints, which imported into photography a corporeality that previously belonged to painting (or to communication, as was the case with the Russian avant-gardes from the early 1920s)—the widespread use of high-resolution portable image-capturing techniques, coupled with the capacity for image storage, has produced a contrary and unexpected effect: a nostalgic return to analogue techniques, a renewed sensitivity to the sophistication of printing (as evidenced by the resurgence of platinum printing, for instance), and a renewed importance of the photobook, often in the form of an artist’s book, with all the multiplicity of possibilities that such a format can entail. On the other hand, the disassociation of photography from the notion of an “exemplary image”, mainly through the use of seriality, has introduced into the photographic universe—especially since the 1970s—a notion that the image is always a system of interdependencies, blurring the epistemological boundaries of the photographic field or subsuming it into the broader realm of artistic image production. Photography is thus undergoing a profound crisis, but not one of identity (which has long been examined and pondered by practitioners and commentators alike), but one of relevance: Why is it important to produce new images? The answer can only be addressed by producing images that consciously strive to exist on the fine line between their representational quality, their interrogation of the relationship with the viewer, and how they deal with the physical, material, and embodied melancholy of their presence. In this sense, the path for photography can only reside in the complexity of the material production process of the image, which, to justify its existence, must be the outcome of an epistemological process of editing that might culminate in images whose scale, medium, hapticity, or required distance transform them into relevant images. Frequently, the subject matter of images consciously produced within a creative or artistic context is hardly distinguishable from the radically automated images of the smartphone. Sometimes, even their aesthetic, or indeed their technical-representational quality, may be indistinguishable. The field of photography must, therefore, be approached from the perspective of its destiny as a material image, as an imagistic procedure that confronts, through its precise scale, its exact pagination in a book, the rigour of its editing, and the materiality of its presence, an engaged viewer. It is in this sense that the teaching of photography is fundamental—not (or not only) as a historically transversal inquiry into the procedures that can generate images, but as an education towards an economy of relevance for each image, requiring a shared reflection on the equation that anything can be photographed, but the image is not a representation of that thing—it is the result of a process of choices and subtleties that define a relationship. Cover image: Exhibition of the Contrast project at the Portuguese Centre of Photography (2024)
About the Published Content on Each Section | Exploring Contemporary Realities
Exploring Contemporary Realities: Photography, Ethics, and the Production of Knowledge examines how contemporary photographic practices contribute to critical understandings of culture, space, and society within the editorial framework of scopio Magazine AAI and the CONTRAST III project. The essay analyses four key contributions: Joana Caetano’s “An Ethics of Seeing,” which interprets Gerda Taro’s Spanish Civil War images as “photoscapes” oscillating between utopian aspiration and dystopian testimony; Paul Landon’s “The Resonance of Abandonment,” which reflects on the Vilnius Sports Palace as a modern ruin embodying memory, vulnerability, and failed utopian promise; Dária Salgado and Sérgio Tavares’s “Trees as Visual Thinking,” which foregrounds trees as agents of visual, sensory, and ecological knowledge in the urban landscape; and Lukas Sander’s unfinished, a site-specific video walk interrogating Zurich’s Manegg district as an emergent, corporately branded urban environment in flux. Through these case studies, the essay demonstrates how photography extends beyond representation to become a tool of knowledge production. In dialogue with theoretical perspectives from Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Walter Benjamin, and Michael Marder, the works highlight photography’s capacity to act ethically, to mediate cultural memory, to articulate ecological imaginaries, and to destabilise dominant narratives of urban development. The integration of these contributions within scopio Magazine AAI reflects the broader mission of CONTRAST III, which fosters interdisciplinary collaboration across art, architecture, and design while situating photography within global debates such as the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus. By bridging artistic practice, pedagogy, and research, the project affirms the role of photography as a transversal and interdisciplinary language, capable of confronting contemporary urgencies and nurturing alternative futures. Ultimately, the essay positions visual practice as a privileged medium for generating expanded critical knowledge and constructing new imaginaries of the built and inhabited world.
Open Call – International Drawing and Photography Contest (DPIC)
We are currently in the third edition (2024) of the International Drawing and Photography Contest (DPIc), a competition integrated in scopio Magazine Architecture, Art and Image publication being directed towards the Identity of Universities spaces of teaching experience and work and open to all academic communities, both in Portugal and abroad.
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This section starts by reviewing two exhibitions that are taking place at the international level, which not only reflect contemporary artistic practices but also interrogate the socio-cultural underpinnings of our built environment: The Head, The Heart & The House: Migration and Modernism in King-lui Wu’s Domestic Architecture and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio — Architecture for the Community. Then, a recent curatorial project involving architecture, media and art is presented - Building a Collective Archive: A Yale Traveler’s Mnemosyne -, inviting readers into a thought-provoking journey through the Yale School of Architecture’s latest curatorial endeavour. (...) Cover page: Building a Collective Archive, Exhibition entrance at the Yale’s North Gallery, at Rudolph Hall © courtesy of YSoA
FLASH: REVIEWS AND CURATORIAL PROJECTS | Editor Gabriel Hernández
The collective decision of the Jury, after voting all the submissions, was to give the first prize to “Appropriation of Time” and two honourable mentions to “A Wake-Up Call” and “Oasis of Education”. In overall terms, it can be observed that the submissions that obtained the highest scores share a harmonious equilibrium among three key dimensions: the originality of the project’s concept (idea), the cogency of its rationale (written explanation), and the effectiveness of its visual presentation (imagery). However, it’s worth noting that the Jury members held differing perspectives when it came to identifying projects that masterfully balanced these three dimensions. This diversity of opinions prompted critical reflection on contemporary concerns within our societies and academic institutions. On one hand, some works raised questions about whether modern universities are suitable environments for learning, collaboration, and a sense of belonging. On the other hand, other projects highlighted environmental issues and the resulting decline in the quality of life and education within university settings. (...) Cover page: 1st Prize "Appropriation of Time" by Ana de Sousa, Carla Almeida, José Pedro Mendonça, Sofia Gameiro, Tatiana Monteiro, and Tatiana Mota
Sense of place: How should we think about urban planning practices today?
Considering the recent socio-technological, psychosocial, political, and economic developments, will the urban planning practices (in the systemic sense of its exercise) be able to adapt to a growing, changing urban culture? Noting the diverse variety of contemporary spatial practices in which methods, concepts, and discourses tend to be sealed off from one another, this reflection calls for a reevaluation of the plurality dimensions and layers in the construction of the urban reality, questioning in this process, the predictable hegemony regarding the supremacy of Architecture in shaping modern and current urban imagery. This essay seeks to foster a reflection on new contemporary paradigms of Western urban life, tracing a retrospective view that allows us to look systemically at what we have built. In this process, the aim is to stimulate a future collision path, a conceptual and operational dialogue between the creative disciplines of Architecture and Contemporary Art on the current urbanization courses, proposing this possible relationship as an inseparable disciplinary set in the process of producing public space and urban territory. Putting forth the hypothesis of reassessing the established models of contemporary urban planning, the goal is to explore the possible operationality of the bauhausian canon in its historical disciplinary triad (architecture/art/design) while, in a process of symbiotic interaction, considering them as complementary tools in urban design concept, promoting a pluralistic and expanded dialogue between the processes of designing, requalifying, and resignifying the future places. Cover image: “Plaza de los Fueros”, Vitoria-Gasteiz. Designed in 1979 by Eduardo Chillida and Luis Peña Ganchegui
Techniques of Discovery: Cryptography and Design
Among the core technologies forming the rich archaeology of computation, cryptography is perhaps a subject that has received little attention in architectural studies thus far. However, there are fruitful considerations to draw from a closer inspection of the vast repertoire of techniques that cryptography has developed over a period of about seven centuries. First of all, a deeper historical perspective will help frame cryptography as a technology for discovery rather than solely protecting military and diplomatic secrets. Secondly, these considerations can be of relevance to design as they offer thoughts for both conceptual reflections and practical applications. At a conceptual level, the symbolic, discrete computation accompanying the evolution of cryptographic methods – such as Alberti’s one in 1467 – marked a radical departure from the iconic semiotics of analogue machines. The non-mimetic nature of symbolic computation provided the technological means to significantly widen its range of applications and enhanced speculative thinking. Understood along these lines, cryptography found more general applications beyond concealing diplomatic secrets to provide a rigorous method for inquiry into unknown domains in order to make ‘noisy data’ intelligible. Finally, symbolic computation also provided more advanced techniques for abstraction that were also instrumental for constructing notational drawings, whose emergence coincided with the introduction of more advanced mathematical instruments in the renaissance. The essay will discuss the key paradigmatic moments in the history of cryptography such as the polyalphabetic techniques proposed by L. B. Alberti in 1467 and the use of binary cryptography by Francis Bacon in 1605. Despite their distance from the present, these experiments provide a useful segue into a discussion on how the notion of cypher as a conceptual instrument accompanying the introduction of Machine Learning models in architectural and urban design. Cover image: Albrecht Dürer, The Draughtsman of the Lute
CONTEMPORARY ARCHEOLOGY | Editor Isa Neves
The evolution of aerial surveying from its nascent stages in the early 20th century to the contemporary era of satellite imagery is a narrative of technological and methodological advancement. Initially, the ability to interpret landscapes from above was rudimentary, limited by the infancy of aeronautical activities. However, as aviation developed, particularly spurred by wartime needs, the significance of aerial perspectives grew. The use of photography from aircrafts became a pivotal method for understanding and documenting the Earth's surface, aiding in military strategies through the development of camouflage techniques. This paper explores the historical context in which aerial photography emerged as a critical tool for mapping and reconnaissance, highlighted by examples of camouflage used during World War II and the innovative use of aerial imagery in art and education, such as at the Pratt Institute of Art. It further discusses the transition from manual, piecemeal photographic surveys to the modern era's comprehensive, real-time digital mapping technologies. This transition not only marks a significant technological leap but also a shift in our perceptual understanding of the Earth's surface, as detailed through the examination of aerial imagery of airstrips and the conceptual art project "Earth From Above." This project, which organizes aerial images of airstrips and includes simulations of fictional runways, exemplifies the blend of artistic interpretation and geographic analysis. The paper concludes by reflecting on the philosophical implications of this evolution, drawing on Gaston Bachelard's notions of scale and the miniature, to underscore the changing relationship between humans and their ability to conceptualize and visualize their environment from aerial perspectives. Cover page: Collins, Marjory. 1943. “Camouflage class in New York University, where men and women are preparing for jobs in the Army or in industry, New York, N.Y. They make models from aerial photographs, re-photograph them, then work out a camouflage scheme and make a final photograph.” Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017878858/
IMAGE, SPACE AND CINEMATICS | Editor Miguel Leal
Visual Essays on Urbanity: A Photographic Journey through Architectural Transformations
'The Visual Spaces of Change' (VSC) section emphasises the role of photography and various visual representation methods as pivotal in researching, documenting, and analysing the transformational aspects of architecture, urbanity, and territorial landscapes. This section acknowledges the intricate link between societal transformations and alterations in the spaces we inhabit, with recent historical events underscoring the swiftness of these spatial changes. The radical nature of these transformations has necessitated a consistent and urgent documentation of the impermanent nature of places. Places, inherently uncertain, are captured visually to preserve and understand their essence. Contemporary societal shifts, such as urban gentrification or health-related crises, have brought about significant changes in life patterns, leading to the creation of photographs that were once unimaginable. The VSC resides here, in documentary artistic projects that explore the expanded field of architecture, from its tangible manifestation to the experiences it fosters. It investigates various scales, new spatial configurations, architectural vernaculars, and urban vistas, while also probing into the discursive spaces that intersect with larger frameworks, including socio-cultural, political, historical, and technical realms. By treating images as a form of visual language that is disseminated and interpreted across different global points[1], this section extends its dialogue. It opens up to incorporate diverse cultural viewpoints from various regions, places, and countries, using the specificities of each location to enhance our understanding of society and the territorial landscape. The strategy's objective is to promote the use of images in constructing artistic projects that offer critical reflections on the transformation of architecture and urban landscapes, influenced by the diverse ways they are perceived and experienced. Ultimately, the section seeks to utilise the contemporary significance of imagery, particularly photography, as a means to broaden knowledge. Photography is esteemed as a prime medium for interpreting architecture and for crafting imaginative narratives, navigating between reality and fiction, replication and alteration, and the amalgamation of analogue and digital visual forms, thus traversing various disciplines and blurring artistic demarcations. The section commences with James Smith's visual essay "Temporal Dislocation", which explores the contrasting interplay between destruction and regeneration in our interactions with landscapes. Smith's photographic series highlights the recurring patterns of the natural world following human interference, driven by a profound phenomenological perspective. The series bridges the intentional composition by the photographer and the incidental engagement of the viewer with these reconfigured landscapes, positioning the photograph as a subtle form of communication that invites reevaluation of the common and omnipresent. "Urban Wilderness: A Journey through Lisbon Terrain Vague" by Lorenzo Iannizzotto focuses on the piecemeal and indeterminate nature of the so-called "Terrain Vague" or "Urban Voids" in Lisbon. Iannizzotto employs photography as a means to explore and articulate these spaces, presenting them in a fragmented and sporadic fashion that honours their intrinsic features. His work uncovers the latent charm of these spaces, highlighting their considerable potential for urban development. Cover images: Temporal Dislocation - Watchtower (2011) and 38°44’16”N 9°06’38”W (2023)
VISUAL SPACES OF CHANGE | Editors José Carneiro, Pedro Leão Neto