No. 5 (2022): Art, Architecture and Visual Culture

Thinking about the city brings together different spheres of knowledge that open up a range of approaches to understanding it; a place overflowing with experience, an expanding territory currently marked by the phenomenon of globalization and the acceleration of experience in all its dimensions. In this sense, we have not been able to avoid reflections from art theory, as well as certain philosophical, sociological, psychological, scientific, historical, anthropological, and, in short, vital considerations, as these are an integral part of the passion that drives a visual culture that seeks to make visible the devices and rhetorics of legitimization that act on the city as formalized codes, and consequently on the modes of social relations.

This issue of Umática. Art, Architecture and Visual Culture has attempted to bring together contemporary visions as an act of cultural resistance. The interaction between disciplines today unfolds an open space and we have paid attention to some architectural developments and artistic practices in which we find vectors of meaning to investigate the fissures that we detect between the function and use of architecture and urbanism, between the memory and the present of the architectural fact as the significant cultural artifact that it is. The analysis of the surrounding reality and its causes, and the continuous reflection on everyday experience - from an artistic perspective that practices more the gaze of the active/critical passer-by than that of the tourist consumer/user - gives shape to this collection; projects that interrogate, question, define, underline, predict or alert us, if not directly in a tangential way, to the right to the city that Henry Lefebvre theorized. (...)

Cover image: Luis Camnitzer, The Perfect Crime (2018) | © Luis Camnitzer, 2018 (Courtesy of the Author).