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
Every February in Southern Italy, the LGBTQ+ community gathers for a religious event at the Sanctuary of Montevergine in Mercogliano, a small village nestled in the hills of Irpinia. The group collectively enters trance-like states which celebrate “Mama”, a local medieval black Madonna who is believed to protect the marginalised…. Read more »
The question whether comets are habitable, and how their potential inhabitants would endure such unforgiving characteristics, was seriously considered by early modern speculators on extraterrestrial life. First published in French in 1875, this extract from Amédée Guillemin’s book “The World of Comets” (Les Comètes) summarises a few of those views,… Read more »
Southern California is many things. Quite infamously, it is known as a landscape defined by the automobile, from the emergence and diffusion of the highway system to fast food burgers, and the suburbanization of the United States. Walking this place then, would seem not only inconvenient, but ill advised. In… Read more »