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
The poetics of a space that might never have been – a lake, that emerged in the city of Rome during the excavations for a shopping mall. Photographer Dario Li Gioi has been visiting this place for years and contemplates how its unique ecosystem today offers a counterbalance to the… Read more »
What role can public art play in constituting the experience of a place? For fifteen years, Mili Romano has curated Heart of Stone, a series of multidisciplinary interventions in the town of Pianoro, in the province of Bologna. Morphologically transformed by redevelopment processes imposed from above, this small village, already… Read more »
The Salt Mountain is a geological site in the town of Cardona, Spain, composed of an impressive and complex web of saline rock formations. Today a tourist attraction, the mountain, as the official website Cardona Tourisme claims, “is still growing as the rain erodes it” resulting in a diapir of… Read more »