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