Sophia Journal is currently accepting submissions on the theme of its third thematic cycle “Landscapes of Care”, addressing contemporary photography and visual practices that focus on how architecture understood in a wide sense can help to heal a broken planet. The concept of “Landscapes of Care” has increasingly been adopted by diverse areas of study, from health geography to the arts and architecture. It allows us to understand architecture, city and territory as living and inclusive organisms, constituted by multifaceted landscapes with complex social and organisational spatialities which embody the difference and the other, the strange, the unfamiliar, the indigenous, the human and the non-human. Our aim is to explore the ways in which the image can be used as a meaningful instrument of research about the multifaceted complex socioeconomic, political, historical, technical and ecological dimensions of architecture, city and territory that testify, question or emerge from those relationships of care.
For the 7th issue of Sophia Journal and first issue in the cycle, we are focusing on the emergence of landscapes of care in unstable territories. These territories may be, but are not exclusive to: the desert, the icy lands, the rainy forests; territories within uncertain boundaries, e.g. between land and water; territories inhabited by native communities; territories that dramatically alter their configuration due to extreme weather conditions and scarce resources, or which natural resources are violently exploited and violated. Such territories hold vital information about patterns of resistance, flexibility, transformation and metamorphosis, enlightening the problems of vulnerability and resilience in the unforeseen future while opening up new perspectives of design, including new ways of poetically inhabiting the world as a place of encounter between species (following Haraway’s motto “staying with the trouble” and Guattari’s demand: “We need new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self in relation to the other, to the foreign, the stranger”), protecting the ecosystems and understanding architecture, more than the distribution of spaces, as the distribution of the sensible.
We are looking for submissions that engage with the issues above in the form of theoretical papers, visual essays, interviews, and critical reviews of publications, exhibitions, and conferences.
