About Anima Loci
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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
In summer 2025, for one entire week, walking became the defining activity in Prespa, a mountainous transboundary landscape where two ancient freshwater lakes traverse Greece, Albania, and North Macedonia. Through acts of healing, experiencing, resisting and becoming, WAC 25 explored walking as a multifaceted practice as part of the wider,… Read more »
More than just a large male marble face near the heart of Rome, the Bocca della Verità is above all a medieval legend about the existence of a statue that would bite the hand of anyone who lied while placing it inside. This 1891 text was written by Ersilia Caetani… Read more »
With thousands of miles of stone walls and remnants of prehistoric settlements, the three Aran Islands in Galway Bay, Western Ireland, recently served as the setting for a short film essay entitled Aran Diary (2023) by researcher and filmmaker Maurizio Cinquegrani. This piece shares glimpses of the walks and ideas… Read more »