The competition for the cover image

Abstract

At the end of the issue, the journal publishes all the proposals received for the cover image and thanks the authors who joined the competition ‘The Geography of the Image’.

Call for papers ‒ In the current ‘global condition’ in which humanity finds itself, the image has assumed a fundamental role in governing the media and in creating new mythologies that give life to deep behavioural models: different outcomes of various evolutionary lines marked by history. This role is evident in Western culture but also in other cultures, especially in the Eastern one that today proposes alternative communication spaces, full of fantastic suggestions. The geographical location of these multiple ways of articulating images gives rise to a zoning of the planet in distinct ‘representative plates’ that collide along borders similar to faults, where ‘conceptual and visual earthquakes’ are produced that act in a continuous comparison of continuity, discontinuity, similarities and differences. Investigating this ‘geography of the image’ through appropriate thematic maps that describe the articulation in space, but also the evolution over time, can provide a new key for reading, theoretical and operational, the transformations of landscapes, cities and buildings, but also the ways of being of the people who populate them. Spatial‒temporal maps therefore, to fully understand also the history of figurative models used by different civilizations. The revolution induced by the 2020 pandemic cannot but play a role in this: it is clear that the mutations it will produce in human life, in every corner of the planet, will become very important and to a large extent perhaps irreversible. As actions, places, gestures and in general all social behaviour change, the images that represent them and the ways of creating them will also inevitably change. It can be expected that the visual forms used in the various cultural contexts will not only change rapidly and profoundly, but will also be divided into directional flows whose geographical distribution today is unpredictable. They will be flows of ideas, symbols and models that will mark the territorial dynamics of new ‘migrations’: perhaps the most global in history, capable of marking new ‘figurative frontiers’; frontiers that may then prove useless and of which, if we can and want, we may wish to do without.