This article presents an on-going research project developed by the Department of Architecture of the University of Ferrara and AMI Ferrara regarding home-work mobility patterns in local agro-industrial production. By combining quantitative and qualitative research tools (i.e. literature review, surveys, interviews, GIS-mapping), this research originally aimed to research habits, needs, and propensity to change of agricultural workers in the area in relation to home-work mobility. The investigation therefore necessarily has to confront “caporalato”. Bearing in mind existing power relations and the inherent opacity of dynamics in agricultural work, we highlight the difficulties encountered by the mapping campaign, as well as the dangers of its instrumentalization when addressing such work relations. By emphasizing the tendency of agricultural day-labourers to defy localization, we aim at departing from this lack (or absence) of information to suggest the relevance of a critical approach to mapping in contemporary racial capitalism. The paper finally proposes substantial theoretical frameworks, extensive field research and investigative campaigns on-the-ground in contrast to the strictly vertical, top-down and technocratic approach of traditional mapping, in order to answer to mobility habits and needs of agricultural workers.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
This study explores Eastern Orthodox aesthetics through a parallax lens, situating it at the intersection of theology, anthropology, and cultural practice to move beyond the icon-centric discourse. It examines how Orthodox aesthetics, rooted in the theological vision of beauty as divine disclosure, manifests in liturgical ethos, material culture, and secular artistic expression. The analysis draws on Christos Yannaras’ ethos of liturgical art, Chrysostomos Stamoulis’ exercise in philokalic aesthetics, and Timothy Carroll’s ethnographic material ecology of Orthodox Christianity, revealing beauty as an ontological event of communion and transformation. A parallax shift to Dionysis Savvopoulos’ lyrics uncovers an aesthetic eschatology, or an aesthetics of eschatology, where Orthodox themes of resurrection and festivity permeate non-ecclesial Greek culture. Employing a comparative, interdisciplinary methodology, the study integrates theological reflection, ethnographic insights, and cultural analysis. It concludes that Orthodox aesthetics is a dynamic field where beauty, truth, and eschatological hope converge, extending beyond the sanctuary into everyday practices and popular art—“incarnated” in material reality. This transdisciplinary approach reconfigures Orthodox aesthetics as a theological anthropology, offering fresh perspectives on its role in contemporary discourse and its diffusion into the public sphere, while advocating for material culture as a critical lens for future exploration.
The familiar format of the pop-up book provides a dynamic artistic springboard for creatives working with digital media in the twenty-first century. This article explores how and why the format of the pop-up book, and other historic paper-engineered artefacts, have been utilised to re-imagine British children’s literature “classics” in contemporary transmedia adaptations. To demonstrate this phenomenon, I compare the formal aesthetics and experiential potential of two recent works. In Mary Poppins Returns (2018), a cinematic Disney adaptation of P. L. Travers’s early-twentieth-century Mary Poppins book series, a CGI-animated pop-up book serves as a theatrical stage for a bawdy music-hall performance. In Curious Alice (2021), a psychedelic virtual reality (VR) rendering of Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth-century Alice books at the Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser, players were whisked into a peepshow Wonderland crafted from pixelated paper. Both texts remediate paper-engineered devices to literally re-animate key chapters of these classics, but also to metaphorically re-animate, and continue, the legacies of celebrated authors from past centuries for the next generation of young readers. In this way, remediated movable books can reinstate the seemingly immovable status of classics such as Alice and Mary Poppins, elevating their “timeless” appeal to the “universal” desires of children to become immersed in fantastical storyworlds. This renewal is partly achieved by the amplification of the movable book’s “temporal paradox”, as an artefact that is both perpetually novel and forward-looking, yet rooted in analogue nostalgia for the past. The icon of the pop-up book, in particular, creates a conceptual bridge between the figure of the imaginative, intuitive, Romantic, nineteenth- and twentieth-century child, and the media-saturated, transliterate young consumer of today, recalibrating classics for modern tastes and challenging current understandings of the child.
Drawing. Design. Illustration, Literature (General)
Feedback on the work of staging an American theatrical text on the contemporary French scene : The Lonely Soldier Monologues (Women at War in Iraq) written by Helen Benedict in 2009, and translated into French by translators from Maison Antoine Vitez in 2018. The play is directed by Dinah Pedarros at the Regional Conservatory in Nice in June 2024 and as part of a PhD project supervised by Emeline Jouve (professor of American literature and culture, specialist in US theater at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès) and Christophe Triau (professor of theatrical aesthetics at the University of Paris Nanterre and playwright), they are both members of the ANR ACTiF (American Contemporary Theater in France) program.
This paper analyzes the role of the architectural concept in the creation and life of the city. Aiming to identify the urban qualities in the concept, I introduce the distinction between the first and the second object of architecture, where the former represents the architectural concept, which then materializes its authenticity in the latter, that is, architecture’s real state. Within this temporal order of architectural creation, the paper focuses on the transition from the first object to the second, in which the (urban) reality is assumed to be altered by producing the architectural concept. In explaining such alteration, I employ the dialectics between concept and context. My main hypothesis is that to define the architectural concept necessarily implies the definition of its context, that is, the representation of its real exteriority. At the urban level, the inevitable particularity of architecture becomes an aesthetic quality, thanks to which the impossible task of de-fining the city is overcome and made irrelevant for reaching the state of (urban) conjunction. With every architectural concept being realized, the urban reality becomes altered, or multiplied. The urban contextualization, in this sense, implies not simple summation, but rather conjunction of at least two different concepts, whose difference, however, originates from the act of fundamental disjunction. To explain this paradox, I employ Hegel’s notion of aufheben, aiming to reconcile the radical architectural opposition between the conceptual and the contextual, in favor of the idea of the multiplicity of realized concepts – that is, second objects of architecture. What in architecture appears as an opposition of concept and context, serves on the urban level to overcome the problem of (contextual) finitude of the city, and then produce a new, positive difference within it.
Among the materials for the 1935 Exposé of the Arcades Project: “Toppling of illusionism in the
cityscape: perspectives”.1
Haussmann the demolition artist opened up nineteenth-century Paris. He created perspectives, new
views in perspectives down long, straight and broad streets. These are perspectives, Frisby notes, that
are “cleared for all except admirers, spectators and […] consumers”.2 Walter Benjamin recognises
Haussmann’s true goal: “to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of bar-
ricades in the streets of Paris impossible for all time”.3 Perspectives against radical political change.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
L’articolo si muove da una riflessione sui piccoli paesi che, perdendo gli abitanti e le pratiche che li
costituiscono, si trasformano gradualmente in luoghi fantasma, in cui i residui spettrali dello spo-
polamento si sovrappongono ai ripopolamenti fantasmagorici che nuove strategie di valorizzazione
turistica si propongono di generare.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
The practice of urban commoning continues to tickle the imagination of activists and academics alike. Urban commoning’s aesthetic dimension, yet, has not been fully understood. This contribution seeks to fill such gap and approaches aesthetics in the literal sense: That which presents itself to sense perception. The article thus asks: To what extent may commoning practices that are dedicated to the disclosure of unheard voices (hence having an aesthetic dimension) shift urban power relations? This contribution takes its cue in Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and has the commoning experiment of Pension Almonde as its central case. Pension Almonde constituted a commons‐based, temporary occupation of a vacant social housing complex in Rotterdam, aimed specifically to undo the subordinate position of urban nomads and orphaned cultural initiatives. The article finally develops the distinction between a particular‐aesthetic dimension (making unheard voices merely perceptible) and a universal‐aesthetic dimension (shifting power relations) of urban commoning. Given the case’s lack of collective agency and external resonance, urban power relations remained in place.
Entre 2010 e 2015, o contexto migratório português alterou-se significativamente em consequência dos impactos sociais da crise financeira e económica, o que resultou num saldo migratório negativo, combinando redução do fluxo de entrada e incremento nas saídas de imigrantes (para novos destinos ou retorno ao país de origem) com o aumento da emigração portuguesa. Neste contexto, alguns casais luso-brasileiros mudaram-se para o Brasil, onde as oportunidades económicas e sociais, naquele período, pareciam mais favoráveis; contudo, entre 2016 e 2019, esse fluxo terá de novo oscilado, favorecendo agora Portugal enquanto espaço de destino. Combinando dados quantitativos sobre casamentos e nascimentos para demonstrar as ligações familiares entre brasileiras/os e portugueses/as e dados qualitativos coletados em entrevistas com famílias luso-brasileiras que vieram para Portugal, este texto procurou escrutinar duas ideias principais: (i) as razões do retorno para Portugal e a relevância dos contextos familiares, neste processo; e (ii) os projetos migratórios futuros e as suas implicações na (im)permanência neste país europeu. Teoricamente este artigo pretende desafiar e discutir categorias migratórias clássicas dos estudos migratórios como emigrantes-imigrantes e, sobretudo, partida e retorno, posicionando-as em contextos binacionais. Pretende-se assim desafiar a noção clássica de retorno a partir de uma perspetiva centrada em sujeitos migrantes mais complexos (os casais mistos) em relação aos espaços originais de referência que, por sua vez, também se vão transformando no quadro da circularidade migratória.
Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Objects of faith in various parts of the world draw visitors of all denominations, for different reasons. This paper studies the polysemic behaviour of people going to Quiapo Church in Manila, the Philippines. In particular, it focuses on the mammoth processions participated in by tens of thousands in a show of devotional fervour. In the conclusion, I tease out and summarise this aesthetic experience of devotion capturing the embodied values as annotated by the pilgrims. The three embodied values are a sense of personal miracle, a need to reciprocate, and a sense of community with and through this wooden image of the Black Nazarene with fellow devotees. This pilgrimage represents a radical levelling of social classes for the duration of a person�s participation in the ritual.
Philosophy. Psychology. Religion, Philosophy of religion. Psychology of religion. Religion in relation to other subjects
Patients with Grade III or IV contracted ocular sockets, most often due to Post Enucleation Socket Syndrome (PESS), suffer from
loss of ocular volume along with a lax lower eyelid, which complicates prosthetic rehabilitation in terms of fit as well as aesthetics.
Surgical correction is preferable, though not always feasible. A non-invasive approach for prosthetic rehabilitation of such difficult
cases, using bandaging and progressively larger conformers is described here.
Michele Viviene Carbinatto , Lorena Nabanete Reis Furtado
To transcend the idea of objectifying the body and its movements in gymnastics and its technique-based sessions and/or classes, we propose some reflection on the artistic and aesthetic aspects of gymnastics for the Gymnastics for All (GfA) program. Officially guided by FIG (Féderation Internationale de Gymnastique), it is common that GfA composition includes group performances in festivals, whether they are competitive or not. This article describes the journeys of two GfA teams that developed practitioner-centered, not coach-centered choreographies supported by the stages of creativity proposed by Kneller (1973).More than learning/doing or even learning/memorizing coded, standard sequences, it is essential to explore possibilities of dialogue between the individual and the various elements that surround him/her, by establishing a parallel between GfA features and the creative, collaborative choreographic process in the Arts (Dance and Theatre). The coach’s egocentrism is redefined, and he/she is stripped of the choreographer’s role e. The choreography should be considered a sketch and should inspire constant change. It will be influenced by what spectators thinks of it, how it can inspire other artists, and how participants will feel fulfilled by it. There should be endless opportunities. Shaping movement and connecting actions gradually reveal the proposed theme and give rise to technique and aesthetics: that is the major challenge of the choreographic process.
This paper takes up the somewhat neglected work of one of the earliest pioneers of modern European aesthetic theory, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos. It aims to correct views in which Du Bos is pigeon-holed as a ‘sentimentalist’, dismissed as a radical subjectivist, or, at best, acknowledged as an influence on the more important work of David Hume. Instead, it presents Du Bos as an original thinker whose highly intuitive approach to the arts is still relevant to contemporary concerns, and can be favourably contrasted with the tradition of disinterested, universalist aesthetics that rose to such strong prominence in the century following his work. It highlights several of his ideas that have not received sufficient attention, including his emphasis on boredom as a motivation for turning to artifice, his notion of the ‘artificial emotions’ that can result from such encounters, his community-based conception of taste, his faith in the general public as legitimate judges of artwork, and the importance he places on different forms of interest when thinking about art. In the course of this discussion, Du Bos’s work is presented as presciently questioning clear cut distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural spheres, as well as exploring contemporary questions about the constitution of ‘the public’ and the legitimacy of its judgement. It also argues that the vocabulary of ‘artificial emotion’ can be as helpfully applied to the increasingly sophisticated world of mass entertainment as it can be to the world of contemporary art.
This commentary discusses the paper by Schubert and colleagues in the context of the recent proposals in the field of empirical aesthetics and neuroaesthetics, emphasizing the need for inclusion of the time variable for accounting for the dynamic nature of a musical experience. At the same time, the efforts of the authors for systematizing the concepts in the field are praised.
<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Starting from the studies of McHarg, there is a growing interest to a development more respectful and less destructive of natural values. In the time it’s been settled a common feeling trough the environmental issues related to deterioration, consumption and pollution of the resources.<br /> This new environmental feelings it’s been also tackled in the field of land and urban planning, that had to revise instruments and techniques, and to redefine its knowing bases using the knoledges and the instruments of ecological disciplines (related both to extra-urban lands and to urban fabrics).<br /></span>Talking with prof. Oliva we analyze the environmental and landscape contents of the new city plan of Rome, adoptee by the city council in the 2003. </p></div></div></div>
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying
Jackeline Barcelos Pontes, Maria Inez Montagner, Miguel Ângelo Montagner
Introduction: The cult of body in modern society, seen as a vector ofindividuality, places beauty and aesthetics as happiness and wealthfactors. With rigorous and unreachable established patterns,the number of people affected by food-related disorders andcollective subjectivity increases. Orthorexia nervosa, a relativelyrecent eating disorder first described in 1997, is characterizedby the obsession with what is normally seen as healthy food.Individuals affected by the disorder seek foods considered “pure”,spending time and effort in the pursuit of healthy food that isincompatible with everyday life and puts them away from socialrelations. Objective: This study was intended to translate andculturally adapt the Ortho-15 questionnaire, developed in 2005as a tool of perception of orthorexia. Methodology: Translation ofthe Ortho-15 from Italian to Portuguese followed by discussionand implementation of pilot testing with a focus group to enablethe questionnaire to be firstly used in a study with TechnicalNutrition students in Brasilia, Federal District, Brazil, andeventually in other studies. Results: Ortho-15 was adapted foruse in the target population. Conclusion: Translation and culturaladaptation of Ortho-15 is of great importance, since there areno published studies on the prevalence of orthorexia in Brazil.Further studies to determine the psychometric properties of the questionnaire are suggested.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/demetra.2014.8576
Wittgenstein has often explored language games that have to do with musical objects of different sizes (phrases, themes, formal sections or entire works). These games can refer to a technical language or to common parlance and correspond to different targets. One of these coincides with the intention to suggest a way of conceiving musical understanding. His model takes the form of the invitation to "hear (something) as (something)": typically, to hear a musical passage as an introduction or as a conclusion or in a certain tonality. However one may ask to what extent or in what terms (literal or metaphorical) these procedures, and usually the intervention of language games, is requested by our common ways of understanding music. This article shows through the use of some examples that aspectual perception inherent to musical understanding does not require language games as a necessary condition (although in many cases the link between them seems very strong), in contradiction with the thesis of an essential linguistic character of music. At a basic level, it seems more appropriate to insist on the notion of a game: to understand music means to enter into the orbit of "music games" which show an autonomous functioning. Language games have, however, an important function when we develop this comprehension in the light of the criteria of judgment that substantiate the manner in which music is incorporated in and operates within specific forms of life.
Em novembro de 2008, no Vale do Itajaí, na Região Sul do Brasil, ocorreu um desastre associado à precipitação extrema de chuvas, que atingiu 1,5 milhões de pessoas, com 135 mortos e cerca de 80.000 desabrigados e desalojados. Após o evento, algumas intervenções foram propostas no Município de Blumenau, tais como, a urbanização da margem do Rio Itajaí-açu, na área central da cidade. O artigo aborda essa proposta de intervenção, a partir das discussões sobre o planejamento territorial pós-desastre e a atuação das instituições na gestão dos recursos naturais e do espaço urbano. O caso mostra que, apesar da necessária reflexão sobre o padrão da ocupação urbana, os desastres tornamse oportunidades para intervenções com caráter de exceção e emergência, sem o devido planejamento e discussão sobre os impactos nos sistemas sociais e ecológicos. A frágil governança deu origem a um conflito entre a Prefeitura Municipal e instituições e atores organizados em torno da proteção ambiental e dos recursos hídricos, o que levou a impasses na intervenção emergencial.<br>In November 2008, in the Itajai Valley in the South Region of Brazil, a disaster occurred with extreme of precipitation affecting 1.5 million people, with 135 dead and around 80,000 displaced or homeless. Afier the event, interventions were proposed in the City of Blumenau such as the urbanization on the margin of the Itajai-açu river in the central area. The paper addresses this intervention within the context of discussions on post disaster territorial planning and institutional performance in natural resource management and urban space. This case shows that despite the necessary reflection on the pattern of urban occupation, disasters become opportunities for interventions characterized as exceptions and emergency, without an adequate planning and discussion about the impacts of the social and ecological systems. The fragile governance resulted in a conflict between the county administration and the institutions and actors organized around environmental protection and the water resources, which has led to a gridlock in the emergency intervention.
Architecture, Aesthetics of cities. City planning and beautifying