Rethinking / questioning urban realities: another look at the identity of the 14 Faculties of the University of Porto.

The communication exercise - rethink / question urban realities - another look at the identity of the 14 Faculties of the University of Porto - has as a general goal to lead each group of students to create, during one semester, a set of visual narratives about each Faculty, communicating in a critical and poetic way the relation of each of these teaching and research spaces with the city and its ways of appropriation. These visual narratives will be developed by the students in the form of an artist's book, that is, in a zine or photographic book.

The aim is that the photographic projects communicate in an unconventional way, the richness and variety of the reality of these territories - 14 Faculties of the U. Porto - where the architecture of the Faculties, their relation with the City and their History sometimes assume a remarkable role in the character of the space and its experiences.
It is intended to offer new perspectives on these spaces, looking for details and visions that can give relevance to characteristics of these spaces that otherwise would not be recognized. The goal is to go beyond what is obvious, trying to communicate what is more subtle or complex, taking into account the multifaceted richness of these places, building a visual narrative that is a critical and allegorical memory device of the space. We are interested in photography that belongs simultaneously to the documentary and fictional universes, with the freedom to adopt different artistic strategies in order to make possible different levels of contamination between these two universes.

The book or zine should reflect a group identity and a critical look at the architecture and space of the city it is part of, representing at different scales and in the light of a new perspective, the richness and diversity of characteristics of each place or space selected, both in its interior and exterior experience.

The conclusion of this exercise presupposes the final version of the visual narrative in a book, properly identified, as well as its online version placed in a gallery space in the Visual Spaces of Change (VSC) platform. The VSC platform is intended to be a space open to the entire academic community and other institutions and people with an interest in these matters, making visible and accessible the work of the students developed in the course, so that each group can analyze the work of their colleagues and exchange ideas about it.