scopio Challenge for photography
on the age of COVID-19
PT | EN
The challenge is to create a visual narrative that is grounded on your daily life experience in this difficult moment of isolation because of the COVID-19 crises.
Our interest is a contemporary photography project documenting the personal and emotional experience of life under the restrictions imposed by COVID-19, which may mean photographing one’s intimate space or immediate urban surroundings and rethinking this new reality confronting what is happening and the feelings that this situation creates on all of us.
A visual narrative that can have an aura of melancholy, or which may be impassioned and raw or the other way-round, communicating a strong romantic dimension, but above all that is able to awaken a strong emotion or feeling in each of us, to have an intensely subjective effect simply from a detail, or “accident” that you can find in its images. Using Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, we call for a visual narrative where certain images have the potential to arouse something very strong in us, a punctum; “(...) as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see.”[1] Something more than just the general interest of studium.
The aim is to explore and question the domestic life and urban realities of several cities and territories in this difficult moment of isolation because of the COVID-19 crises, allowing several domestic spaces, urban spaces, building sets, public spaces and other urban components to be object of a non-conventional photography series.
A visual narrative that has as base the capacity and will to communicate with others, thus putting us back in touch simultaneously with our inner, hidden selves and with life surrounding us. A photography series that are able to communicating the emotional experience of life in domestic or / and urban space, under the restrictions imposed by COVID-19, exploring critical and allegorical memory devices and the documental and fictional universes, existing the freedom to adopt several artistic strategies in a way to make it possible several levels of contamination between these two universes.
Organisation and contacts
. scopio Challenge – Rethinking, Questioning Urban Realities through photography on the age of COVID-19 is a joint initiative of Cityscopio Cultural Association with researchers from FAUP and FBAUP, having the institutional support of U. Porto Rectorate.
Responsability and initiative
· Architecture, Art and Image Research Group (AAI / CEAU / FAUP)
· Architecture, Art, Image and Innovation Laboratory (AAi2 Lab)
· Cityscopio Cultural Association
Organization coordination
· José Carneiro (FBAUP)
· Maria Neto (FAUP)
· Mário Mesquita (FAUP)
· Pedro Leão Neto (FAUP)
Contacts
· info@cityscopio.com
· scopiochallenge@cityscopio.com
· Architecture, Art and Image (AAI)
ENTRIES SUBMISSION AND DEADLINES
Deadline for submission of photography projects:
First stage 31 July 2020 || Second stage 31 December 2020
The submission must consist of a zipped folder (max. size 10 MB) named with the name of the participant (FIRSTNAME_LASTNAME.zip) with the following content:
a. a folder with a minimum of 5 images and a maximum of 20 images in JPEG format with the longest side 2000px, saved for web with approximately reduced quality to 30%;
b. the total set of images should not exceed 10MB;
c. a short biography to place in the gallery (all texts must be translated in portuguese and english);
d. synopsis of the project (all texts must be translated in portuguese and english).
Send submission to email: scopiochallenge@cityscopio.com
Publication
The accepted work will be published in scopio network and some of these submitted works may also be selected to publish in scopio Newspaper, with a limited edition in paper.
[1] Roland Barthes, A Câmara Clara: Nota sobre Fotografia. Rio Janeiro, Nova Fronteira, 2004. p. 89