Historical City and Visual Representation
Description
This book analyses the complex relationship between European historical cities and their visual representations from the postwar period to the present. Using approaches and methodologies from different disciplinary fields, authors address the tangible and intangible transformations of cities in relation to the varied images produced and conveyed by different media over time. To this end, various photographic and cinematographic representations of the city are analyzed, as well as more "unusual" narratives and images as home-movies, video art projects, murals, and street art. All in all, this book presents extensive theories and case studies around the interrelationships between cities and the system of different visualizations that increasingly shape their materiality and experiences. By analyzing how the image of historical cities is constructed and evolves alongside their urban fabric, as well as the transformations this may generate in terms of imaginaries and social structures, it also provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of aesthetics and history in those phenomena lying at the intersection of images, politics, architecture, and urban planning.
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Content
Introduction.- Part I: The Historical City in Image: Photography, Storytelling, and Urban Politics.- Safeguarding the Visual Memory of a Territory. An Inexhaustible Collective Heritage with which to Observe the Changing City.- The "Tale of Tales" of Via Zamboni in Bologna.- "Tra Rivolta e Rivoluzione - Immagine e Progetto", an Exhibition in Bologna in the early 1970s.- A Day in Taglieristan: Food Kindergarten or Aesthetic damnatio?.- Guarding Thresholds: 1986/2010 Images of Palermo.- Western Pilgrimages and Variations in Seeing (the Historic City): Seven Approaches of the Photographic Image.- Part II: The Historical City in Images: Urban Spaces, Cinema and Everyday Visualisations.- Walter Benjamin's Spatial Ambiguity: The Colportage Phenomenon of Space and the Threshold Experiences.- Are City Symphonies Like Modernity? Genre Representativeness, Modernity Thesis, and Weimar Berlin.- Cities Have Eyes: Architectural Surfaces as Urban Screens.- From Revolutionary Muralism to Hybrid Activism: Reflections on the Portuguese Case.- Neglected Spaces of Exposure: Walls and Abandoned Buildings as Artistic Instances of Territorial Formation.- Chronicle of a Summer: Direct Cinema as an Agent of Urbanity.- Buried Cinema and Forgotten Stories: Amateur Bologna between Urban Continuity and Discontinuity, an Interview with Paolo Simoni.- Cine-Memories in the Branded City: Home Movies' Archives and Urban Aesthetics between Critique and Re-Familiarisation.