About Anima Loci
Follow
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
Despite being one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, Phoenix, Arizona, is one of the few with no Amtrak train transit. While you cannot get in or out of the city by train, it does have a humble light rail system, built in the face of public… Read more »
Until not so long ago, by sailing the northern seas, one could glimpse entire islands appearing and then suddenly vanishing among the tides. But these floating territories, at times even added to maps, may in fact have been the gargantuan body of the Kraken, a legendary monster with multiple arms,… Read more »
On the island of Malakula, part of the nation of Vanuatu, when the time is deemed right by their elders, the youth of the community partake in a coming-of-age ceremony to become manples: literally “men-place.” Anthropologist Jacopo Baron reflects on his personal involvement in these rituals and on the profound… Read more »