Heterotopias and the facesphere: “Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia”
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Silvia Barbotto
Abstract
This exploration of the works of various authors and artists will bring us to a philosophical contemplation of the portrait as a heterotopic space. On one hand, a portrait represents the faces of the self and others, embodying both individuality and collectivity. On the other hand, the space within the conventional frame of a portrait transforms from a mere representation of documented reality to a co-constructed and reified form of expression. The article is divided in three parts. The first part sinks into Lotman’s epistemic groundwork on culture, space, and especially art as a founding philosophical and analytical reference and will also outline the relationship and difference between the semiophere and the facesphere. The second part focuses on establishing a relationship between the facesphere and the heterotopic idea of space and portrait genre. Here the article explores Michael Foucault’s thought in relation to heterotopic space, later proposed in association with the space of the portrait. The third part is devoted to establishing relationships between the theoretical background and the analysis of case studies belonging to the portrait genre selected from photographic works in “Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia,” an exhibition at the National Gallery in Singapore. I will conclude with some brief considerations to summarize the path taken.
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Research funding: This article results from a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 819649-FACETS; PI: Massimo LEONE).
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Some pragmatic consequences to the order of determination of the object’s trichotomies in Peirce’s late semiotics
- Justice must be seen to be done: a multimodal attitude analysis of attorneys’ closing arguments
- Linguistic and cultural peculiarities of Turkish and Arabic speech etiquette in farewells and greetings
- Special section: The face in the sphere: towards a cultural semiotics of the visage; Guest editor: Federico Bellentani
- Oblique semiotics: the semiotics of the mirror and specular reflections in Lotman and Eco
- Heterotopias and the facesphere: “Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia”
- A monument’s many faces: the meanings of the face in monuments and memorials
- Activist masks in the Latin American social protest
- Above the heteronormative narrative: looking up the place of Disney’s villains
- Lotman’s semiotics of culture in the age of AI: analyzing the cultural dynamics of AI-generated video art in the semiosphere
- Review Article
- La sémiotique en 2022 : le bilan de l’année
