No. 4(57) 2024: Italian Studies: Architectonics and Architecture
Guest Editor of the issue:
Nikolaeva Zhanna Viktorovna, PhD, Associate Professor of the Department of Cultural Studies, Philosophy of Culture and Aesthetics at the Institute of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University.
The thematic issue “Italian Studies: Architectonics and Architecture” is devoted to topological and architectural reflection on the themes of Italian culture, considered primarily through its cultural landscape.
Architecture is both a practice, a theoretical act of thinking, and communication. In this issue of the magazine, it is planned to create a field for dialogue between cultures: Italian and Russian. Visual culture is often polemical in nature, and its results, preserved in a material environment, make it possible to conduct a polylogue not only from different points of view from different geographical areas, but also with representatives of bygone eras.
Architectonics is the “architecture of thought” (and this is one of Aristotle’s definitions) and represents a unique event in the development and formation of civilization, which we can see through the creative and theoretical heritage of the Italian masters – an eternally attractive image of the ideal. The actual issue involves, among other things, clarifying the deep movements of culture, considered in a new interdisciplinary research optics, determined by an ethical and aesthetic turn to thinking about intertemporal connections and responsibility to future generations for the images we have left.
Suggested topics for the issue articles:
- Topological reflection, cultural landscape
- Italian architectural traditions
- Italian studies of culture and art
- Heritage: new methods and approaches
- Understanding and cognition of cultures: perception of the image.
- Culture and the Anthropocene
- Architectonics and Architecture
- Atmospherology: the aesthetics of emotional spaces
№ 1(58) 2025: Photographs as things. Researching the materiality of the photographic
Guest editors:
Olga Boytsova, PhD in History, Secretary of the Editorial Board of the journal ‘Anthropological Forum’
Maria Gourieva, PhD in Philosophy, Associate Professor, International School of Arts and Cultural Heritage, European University at St. Petersburg
Historically, comprehension of photography as cultural phenomenon pays main attention to the image. Throughout the twentieth century, theory of photography has focused on the problems of photographic indexicality, photographic authenticity, and the semiotics of the photographic image. The physical characteristics of photographs and their material properties as objects have long remained on the periphery of researchers’ interest.
It was only at the end of the twentieth century that the materiality of photography began to attract the attention of theoreticians. Drawing on cultural anthropology and following the ‘new materialities’, theory of photography in the early twenty-first century turns to photography as a phenomenon directly related to physical and chemical processes and substances. Photographs in this perspective can be considered material objects with which people interact in time and space, living them bodily and affectively. A methodological framework for the theoretical exploration of photographic materiality still needs to be developed.
In this issue we propose to understand by the ‘materiality’ of the photographic, firstly, the physical characteristics of photographic materials, objects, and processes (they may be different at the stages of production, use, and storage of photographs). The physical characteristics of these materials, objects, and processes imply certain possibilities and limitations that affect their use. They also affect the specifics of the subjects’ interaction with photographic objects and technologies in time and space. Secondly, in the notion of ‘materiality of the photographic’ we include multisensory, i.e. not limited to the visual channel of perception, experience of individuals who create, store, look at, show, use photographs.
The following questions are proposed for discussion:
- How do photographic objects, materials, practices influence the social – for example, by organising time and space as well as social interactions that take place in these spatio-temporal coordinates?
- How do the physical characteristics of photographic objects and materials influence the cultural meanings of the photographic?
- What is the relationship between the material characteristics of the photographic and the affective labour of photographs?
- How does the materiality of photographic objects affect the sensory experience of making, using, distributing, storing, destroying photographs?
- What theoretical paths and frameworks are possible for investigating the materiality of the photographic?
