About

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Sophia Journal International Conferences are held annually in a hybrid format, featuring both live and video-conference sessions. These conferences are founded and organized by the Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) research group of the Centre for Studies in Architecture and Urbanism (CEAU) at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP), in collaboration with other institutional partners. This new series of international conferences continues the legacy of the earlier On the Surface: Photography and Architecture conferences, which began in 2010.

The Sophia Journal International Conferences are directly linked to the peer-reviewed and indexed Sophia Journal. They are based on a rigorous blind review process, which selects papers for publication in the journal. Additionally, the conferences feature a selection of Visual Essays chosen by the Editors. The International Conference takes place prior to the final publication stage, providing a platform for expanding the debate and allowing authors to incorporate the insights and discussions from the conference into their forthcoming published work. This collaborative and iterative approach strengthens the academic and visual contributions to the fields of architecture, photography, and urban studies.

In an effort to strengthen the internationalization of these conferences, we are expanding the venues to include other esteemed institutions. A recent example is the Sophia Journal International Conference "Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image," which was hosted by the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon. Building on this success, the current international conference will be hosted at Universidad de Navarra, E.T.S.A., further enhancing our global outreach and fostering deeper international collaboration.

The programme usually encompasses different thematic sections, defined by the editors of each Sophia Journal issue after a selection of papers from the Call that takes place in each Sophia Journal issue. This selection obeys to a competitive double blind peer review process for the papers, which are theoretical articles, nevertheless it is not limited to these traditional academic papers, but also includes practice research in the form of Visual Essays.

This means that accepted submissions for the conference engage with the issues above in the form of theoretical papers, visual essays and invited speakers, thus besides theoretical papers that are blind peer reviewed, we also have the participation of selected practice research in the form of Visual Essays and invited keynote speakers or artists work.

VISION

The Sophia Journal International Conferences aim to promote international debates on Architecture, Art and Image, with a focus on Documentary and Artistic Photography for addressing critical issues that are shaping our contemporary world. 

Each conference aims to contribute for greater social interaction among artistic and cultural institutions and academia, extending the action of museums, universities and art venues beyond their traditionally circumscribed spaces of action. We want to render visible how architectures, places and spaces are used and lived, crossing and shifting traditional boundaries for expanding the capacity of institutions to participate in the public domain. 

In this sense, we aim to contribute for critically thinking architecture as an integrative field of knowledge with historical, cultural, social, economic and political dimensions, and explore photography and other forms of visual production as dynamic processes of discovery, documentation and reflection that incorporates interpretive, artistic and even fictional aspects of these multiple dimensions.

PRESENT
EDITION

past editions

9th Sophia Journal International Conference“Landscapes of Care” Public housing across multiple geographies: crossing theories and practices will present a live and videoconference program organised by University of Navarra -School of Architecture - E.T.S.A. and the event will be broadcasted live online, encompassing a rich and diverse program around: (i) roundtables for each panel concerning a focused topic coming from Sophia´s comprehensive call; (ii) presentation of articles and visual essays submitted; (iii) Photography exhibition: Public housing across multiple geographies.

The concept of Landscapes of Care has increasingly been adopted by diverse areas of study, from health geography to the arts and architecture. It is used here for addressing descriptive, analytical, and interpretative projects that offer a unique perception and new knowledge about housing, its residents, and the city, and its ability to respond to and reflect local conditions and be an element of social-territorial cohesion. Projects that are critical territories capable of expanding our understanding of architecture and social landscape in terms of their language, location, residents, and neighborhood.

This International Conference - Public housing across multiple geographies: crossing theories and practices integrates the thematic cycle Landscapes of Care, addressing contemporary photographic and visual practices that focus on on a dynamic reading of the city that is conditional and conditioned by housing typology. Combining architecture, public housing, habitat, and urban planning, we are convoking works that explore an interpretative narrative about housing and those who live in it, pilot projects with communities of practice capable of generating strategic visions about the possible future of city and territory, housing and the lives it (trans)forms, in this ontological relationship between the Man and house.

Previous International Conferences were:

8th Sophia Journal International Conference, FAUP 2023 presented a live and videoconference program organised by CEAU / FAUP and the event was broadcasted live online, encompassing a rich and diverse program around: (i) roundtables for each panel concerning a focused topic coming from Sophia´s comprehensive call; (ii) presentation of articles and visual essays submitted; (iii) Photography exhibition: The Idea of Álvaro Siza.

This International Conference integrates the thematic cycle “Landscapes of Care”, addressing contemporary photographic 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, architecture and heritage preservation. It is used here in order to understand and document modern architecture, building, city and territory as living and inclusive organisms, as well as heritage resources for global sustainability. 

Modern architecture is a ‘heritage at risk’ as it belongs to a recent past that has not yet been sufficiently recognised by the authorities, scholars and general public. Our aim is to explore the ways in which photography and film can be used as meaningful instruments of research into the socioeconomic, political, historical, technical and ecological dimensions of modern architecture, city and territory.

7th Sophia Journal International Conference, FAUP 2022 presented a live and videoconference program organised by CEAU / FAUP and the event was broadcasted live online, encompassing a rich and diverse program around: (i) roundtables for each panel concerning a focused topic coming from Sophia´s comprehensive call; (ii) presentation of articles submitted; (iii) the opening of Visual Spaces of Change Exhibition.
The talks held at this conference allowed the introduction of a number of issues focused on the emergence of landscapes of care in unstable territories. Territories that 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.

6th International Conference Visual Spaces of Change: Photographic documentation of environmental transformations, FAUP, 2021. This online edition brought together a diverse group of researchers, architects, visual artists, and curators of international relevance, in an exercise of joint reflexivity about photographic documentation of environmental transformation from different perspectives and visual constructs. The talks held at this conference allowed the introduction of a number of issues that are not necessarily foreseen in the initial programme of the conference, enabling an active dialogue between researchers, authors and the public, contributing to the identification of new avenues of research and artistic expression related to how photography can be explored as a meaningful instrument of research about today processes of urban change and architectural spaces. Keynote Speakers : Jesus Vassallo, Iñaki Bergera.

5th International Conference Visual Spaces of Change: Sophia Journal Exhibition and Mobile Projector Award, Auditorium Fernando Távora, FAUP, 2020. The live conference and the videoconferences program was organized within the framework of the Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) Conference and Debate cycle in FAUP, in partnership with UNIZAR, U. Aveiro and DECA / ID. This event have been broadcasted live online, encompassing: (i) a series of videoconferences; (ii) the roundtable launch and presentation of the 4th number of the Peer Review journal Sophia: Visual Spaces of Change: Unveiling the Publicness of Urban Space through Photography and Image; (iii) the presentations of articles of the 5th number of Sophia Journal: Visual Spaces of Change: Designing Interiority - shelter, shape, place, atmosphere; (iv) the launch of the open call for papers for the 6th issue of Sophia Journal: Visual Spaces Of Change: photographic documentation of environmental transformations; (v) the announcement of the awards of the International Competition of Ideas: Exhibition and Mobile Projector and the Visual Spaces of Change exhibition, developed for this conference and for the spaces of FAUP, where new Contemporary Photography Projects were communicated, as well as a new Exhibition Structure that was awarded with the first prize in the International Competition of Ideas: Exhibition and Mobile Projector. Keynote Speakers : Wilfried Wang, Marco Iuliano, Paolo Rosselli, Pedro Gadanho.

4th International Conference On the Surface: Photography on Architecture - Visual Spaces of Change, unveiling the publicness of urban space, in collaboration with MAAT, 2019. On occasion of MAAT’s Fiction and Fabrication exhibition, the 5th International Conference On the Surface: Photography on Architecture offered a forum for an interdisciplinary debate on photography and architecture, with a strong editorial component devoted to the publication of original works and ideas at the intersection of these two fields. The International Conference allowed to debate and explore the potential of Image and Photography as resourceful tools to research, reflect upon and render visible the emergence of new collective experiences in the social space. Keynote speakers: Marco Iuliano, Beate Gütschow, Bas Princen, Gloria Moure and Paolo Rosselli.

3rd International Conference On the surface: Photography and Architecture - Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, FAUP, 2016. It continued the success of the previous three editions of On the Surface, exploring how image is a medium that, on the one hand, can cross boarders and shift boundaries between different subjects and disciplines where image and photography are present in a significant way. On the other hand, in what ways image and photography are used as critical instruments to understand how architecture is transformed, how it reflects different hybrid cultural identities in many countries, regions or places and how all of this interacts with and affects our cities. Keynote speakers: Iñaki Bergera, Paolo Rosselli, Karen Knorr, Philipp Schaerer and Marco Iuliano.
https://tv.up.pt/videos/s048xgk8

2nd International Conference On the Surface: Photography and Architecture - Crossing Borders, Moving Limits, FAUP, 2014. This 3rd edition took place at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) and helped promoting the awareness and reflexion about Documental and Artistic Photography and its conception as an instrument to question the universe of Architecture, City and Territory. This means, among other things, having a wide comprehension about the Architecture's world, as a practice and a discipline that operates, on one hand, in the real space, influencing our perceptive experience and exploring new codes and spacial forms, and one the other, that operates inside wider systems: socio-cultural, technical, political and historical. Keynote speakers: Marco Iuliano and Pedro Gadanho.

1st International Conference On the Surface: Photography and Architecture - Images of Architecture and Public Space in debate, FAUP in collaboration with Guimarães – European Capital of Culture 2012, 2012. The second edition integrated a conference with multiple sessions and a photography workshop in the city of Guimarães – European Capital of Culture 2012 – that had as result a collective exhibition and a publication with the set of selected works. A rich and multifaceted event which included, in addition to the traditional congress, a series of round tables, exhibits and a photography workshop in order to strengthen the diffusion, reflection and informal discussion around the themes of Photography an Architecture. Keynote speakers: Elias Redstone, Marco Iuliano and Philip Ursprung.
https://tv.up.pt/videos/ntnc9-j9

0. 1st International Conference On the Surface: Photography and Architecture, organised by FAUP with collaboration of the Architecture School of the University of Minho (current EAAD-UM), 2010. The first international conference contributed significantly to lead to a greater awareness of the diverse and rich mosaic of the photography’s universe, intensifying the debate on the relation between the architecture and its images, having as context the domain of its new means of digital communication that justify a bigger attention to the public reception of the images than to its pure technical and disciplinary construction. Keynote speakers: Beatriz Colomina, Robert Elwall, Christian Granshirt, Filip Dujardin and Hélène Binet.

Approach

Each conference departs from a theoretical frame organised around a three-years thematic cycle defined for the Sophia Journal. The theme of its third thematic cycle “Landscapes of Care” addresses 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.

Institutional

This conference is organized by the Architecture, Art and Image (AAI) research group integrated in R&D Center of Architecture School of the University of Porto.
Being this event promoted by the world-known “Escola do Porto”, the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (FAUP) is proud of leading the coordination of this Conference, together with the participation of other national and international academic bodies and research institutions involved in tthe Sophia Journal project.

FAUP aims to contribute with these Sophia Journal International Conferences to open academia to society, fostering collaboration among a wide range of cultural and artistic institutions towards common interests and goals in the realmes of Architecture, Art and Image.

Intertwining the research group AAI-CEAU-FAUP and Cityscopio Cultural Association, scopio Editions will be again the official publisher of this conference. Aiming to promote the awareness and reflection upon Architecture and Art, namely Contemporary Photography in regards to its conception as an instrument to question Architecture, City and Territory universe, scopio Editions will be part of this conference through its peer review periodical publication: Sophia Journal.

The conferences will be conducted in English.

SCOPIO EDITIONS: OFFICIAL PUBLISHER OF SOPHIA JOURNAL CONFERENCES

The former editions of these international conferences proved to be an important forum for debate and reflection about Architecture, Art and Image, namely Photography on Architecture, whose work can be accessed freely through sophia journal platform and in book format at FAUP’s library, also being sold in many bookshops as AEFAUP and others alike, as well in scopio network bookstore.
The upcoming editions of Sophia Journal International Conferences intend to yield a significant collection of diverse Texts and Visual Essays, in order to offer a rich reflection through different perspectives addressing contemporary photography and visual practices that focus on how architecture understood in a wide sense can help to heal a broken planet.