About Anima Loci
Anima Loci is a visual culture journal focused on an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between images and the places they inhabit.
The journal hosts short articles and photoessays by academics and practitioners from a variety of disciplines.
Concept
As anthropologist Keith Basso wrote, ‘we are, in a sense, the place-worlds we imagine’.1
The way in which a place is perceived, remembered and interpreted, either individually or socially, represents a mental and emotional landscape that can inform and affect personal and collective historical knowledge, behaviour and identity.
This process of ‘place-making’ is often mediated by images, that act as elicitors for perception and memory. Images are here intended both as physical as well as mental phenomena: a face in a rock, holy icons, new or forgotten architecture, intentional or accidental monuments, to name some examples. Images can also refer to those that have come to represent transforming areas or neighbourhoods. They can refer to spaces that, through the echoes of historic events, have crystallised into images within the social imaginary. Images are therefore understood not simply as artefacts in the external world, but as vital processes that occupy our bodies as their ‘living medium’.2
Anima Loci explores the potential of images that lie in this intermediary zone and the multifaceted ways in which they affect the perception of a place by providing ground for the workings of personal or collective memory, meaning and imagination.
Fields of Interest
Visual Anthropology, Art History, Architecture, Visual Culture, Aesthetics, Urban Archaeology, Research Architecture, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Ethnography, Philosophy, History, Photography, Art Writing, Critical Geography, Psychogeography.
Footnotes
[1] Basso, Keith. H. (1996). Wisdom Sits in Places. Landscapes and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. p.7
[2] Belting, Hans. (2014). An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body. Princeton NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press. p.5
Recent articles
Overlooking the Sicilian capital, Pizzo Sella is a natural promontory also home to hundreds of unfinished constructions – the result of a wave of illegal urban sprawl started in the late 1970s. Artist Erik Smith freely explores the enduring presence of these concrete ghosts, engaging with the fragments – materials… Read more »
Heliograph, Calotype, Talbotype, Daguerreotype: these are some of the early names that circulated prior to the word “photograph” during the early, experimental stages of its invention. This fascinating historical text from the mid-1800s lays out the early development of photography from a point in time when the technology had advanced,… Read more »
Between the areas of Spitalfields and Aldgate in east London, where Middlesex and Wentworth Streets converge to form Petticoat Lane, lies a stretch of market stalls selling clothes, street food and everyday goods. This very space became the setting for a short workshop on place-writing, held in October 2023 by… Read more »