Jorge Sá e Ana Tamen

Esta investigação baseia-se num trabalho de campo realizado no âmbito do Mestrado de Teatro da Universidade de Évora, no Cromeleque de Almendres.

Teve como objetivo a criação de uma performance site-specific com actores, durante cinco dias, mediante uma abordagem imersiva, que se guiava segundo um protocolo pré-estabelecido. Com o título “Conversas com pedras/Talks with stones”, o trabalho é uma interrogação sobre a passagem do tempo, os vestígios de vida anterior e de vida presente, e concretamente este ‘aqui e agora’, que é intrínseco à performance.

O desafio foi o de estabelecer um diálogo sensorial, a todos os níveis físicos e de percepção, com pedras milenares num espaço e um tempo, simbolicamente carregados, que se traduziu numa performance ininterrupta de cerca de 8h por dia, em diversos momentos do dia. Toda a ação foi captada em vídeo e fotografia, para suportar a segunda fase da investigação, que se centra na criação de uma performance expandida no tempo e no espaço, através de técnicas imersivas. Quer isto dizer que o termo site specific explorado pode ser reproduzido, percecionado e vivido fora do lugar, em qualquer tempo através das novas tecnologias, pretendendo-se através de projeções de grande dimensão em telas opacas e transparentes, criar um espaço cénico de diorama e reproduzir ininterruptamente a performance, expandido assim o conceito site specific para além da sua endémica definição.

Maria Josep Mulet Gutiérrez and Joan Carles Oliver Torelló

Stereoscopy was especially important among the techniques adopted by international amateur photography during the first third of the twentieth century. The emergence of more versatile cameras and the frequent allusions to this procedure in the photographic press allow the amateur photographer to take in stereo their excursions and travels, integrating their images into the representative landscape and monumental tradition of nineteenth- century tourist photography. To this predominant thematic line was added a set of personal interests linked to leisure, family scenes, cultural and historical heritage concerns, or those related to own work. An outstanding example is the photographic career of Jaume Escalas Real (Mallorca, 1893-1979), doctor and psychiatrist, director of the Mental Clinic of Mallorca and the Ofcial College of Physicians of the Balearic Islands. Between 1915 and 1975 he documented with his landscapes cameras, events, urban and rural daily life, medical work areas and other scenes of the Islands and images of Barcelona, Madrid and other European localities. He was also an important promoter of the tourist projection of Mallorca through his numerous graphic guides translated into many languages, which show the transition from elite tourism to the masses. Its photographic background has been preserved, until less than 2015, with hundreds of stereoscopic slides and negatives, as well as simple images of various formats, accessories and cameras. Escalas was one of the great amateurs of twentieth-century Europe and his career exemplifies the historical link between stereoscopy and amateur photography.

Seth Thompson

In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, the stereoscope enabled people to see the familiar and the faraway—imagining life outside of their communities—exploring distant places and cultures. While stereoviews may depict foreign places, it can be argued that the content displayed within the stereoview is reflective of the values and interests of the time and place for which it was produced. Underwood and Underwood, an American stereoview publishing company founded in 1882, introduced stereoview boxed sets, which included an accompanying book and set of maps to enhance one’s learning experience. These boxed stereoview sets provided virtual tours of such countries as Italy, England, Greece, India, and France. Underwood and Underwood’s 1905 Egypt Boxed Stereoview Set follows suit, consisting of one hundred stereoviews, an accompanying book and maps to educate its users on “the customs, history and monuments of the ancient Egyptians.”

The production, marketing and consumption of this Egypt boxed stereoview set raises interesting questions such as: how does one order and assess the unfamiliar and how does personal and collective memory inform the gaze as an interpretive lens? Offering insight into the notion of the gaze as an optic through which people understand and interpret the world around them, sociologist John Urry’s concept of the “tourist gaze” is a fitting portal to deconstruct the cultural mechanism in which a preconceived set of expectations and understanding of a culture and its heritage is established. Using the framework of the tourist gaze to investigate Underwood & Underwood’s Egypt Boxed Stereoview Set (1905) and its accompanying book by James Henry Breasted, this paper examines how Egypt and its cultural heritage finds itself perceived through another’s orientation and set of values at the turn of the 20th century as well as its ramifications.