11th SOPHIA JOURNAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE | 25 / 26 September | Portuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section (OASRN)

CONFERENCE LIVE STREAMING YOUTUBE . FAUP
https://www.youtube.com/live/Zvsnrhaf4cg?si=fjc65NuZ1nU72eN7

Host Institution
Portuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section (OASRN)

Program and Book of abstracts

• Book of abstracts

The 11th Sophia Journal International Conference will present a live program organised by Portuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section (OASRN), Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto (FAUP) | CENP — Nuno Portas Centre for Architectural Studies and Culture Centre, Technical University of Porto — UTP / FMAD / ID+, continuing the successful annual cycle of international forums dedicated to the critical exploration of the intersections between image and architecture.

Sophia Journal international conferences and are closely aligned with Sophia's peer-reviewed publication.

The 11th Sophia Journal International Conference — Landscapes of Repair: The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair will take place in Porto on 25 and 26 September 2026, with an in-person programme and online streaming.

From the Legacy of Manplan to Contemporary Practices of Repair

The 11th International Conference continues the programme Wide-Angle View: Architecture as Social Space in the Manplan Series 1969–70, developed at OASRN throughout 2026.

The Wide-Angle View exhibition, which opened on 27 February, revisited the influential photographic series Manplan and was accompanied, between March and May, by a programme of guided visits, public conversations, educational activities and round tables that sought to bring the critical memory of this editorial experiment into dialogue with contemporary questions surrounding housing, the city, public space and representation.

The conference does not bring this process to a close. On the contrary, it extends it, bringing the legacy of Manplan into dialogue with contemporary practices of visual research, representation and intervention, while asking how looking, documenting and making visible may themselves constitute a first form of repair.

Programme — 25 September 2026

09:15 — Reception and Registration

09:30–09:40 — Institutional Opening

Bruno Marques

President of the Northern Regional Board of the Portuguese Architects’ Association

09:40–09:50 — Introduction to the Sophia Journal Cycle at FAUP

José Pedro Sousa

representing FAUP

09:50–10:00 — Official Launch of the Call for Sophia Journal Vol. 12

Learning Repair: Situated Pedagogies, Civic Landscapes and Visual Practices

Pedro Leão Neto

representing CENP

10:00–10:45 — KEYNOTE

Valeria Carullo

Revisiting Manplan: Archive, Visibility and Public Responsibility

10:45–11:05 — Coffee Break

11:05–12:45 — PANEL 1

Making the Invisible City Visible: Memory, Image and the Politics of Representation

Guiding question

What can images make visible that conventional architectural representation leaves unseen — and when can visibility itself become a form of repair?

Chairs: Hugh Campbell & Cristina Gastón

Papers

Sunyoung Park

Photosculpture as a Form of Care and Repair: Re-materialising the Invisible City after Manplan

Ljubica Miric

Remembering the Future City: From Imagination to the Urban Condition

Jared Fantasia & João Soares

Lessons from the Ground: An Architectural Essay on Robert Smithson and the Reclamation of the Post-Industrial Landscape

Visual Essay

Aislinn McCarthy & Evelyn Ågren — A Visual Account of Home as a Situated Place of Resistance

Adrian Aleson & Fernanda del Villar — [Re]Building a Wall

Discussion

12:45–13:45 — Lunch Break

13:45–15:15 — PANEL 2

Repairing the Built: Heritage, Memory and Practices of Re-inscription

Guiding question

How can architecture intervene in what remains without erasing the histories, memories and absences through which the built environment has acquired meaning?

Chair: Ana Miriam Rebelo

Papers

Ana Sofia Pinto & João Pedro Bragança

Back to What Never Was: The Re-inscription of the Monastery of Santa Maria do Mar

Andrea Crudeli

Adaptive Reuse as Critical Repair: The Case of Massimo Carmassi in Pisa

Ana João Costa e Silva

Preserve the Pozzuoli Cathedral: Between Safeguarding the Remaining and Perpetuating the Vanished

Visual Essay

Diana Nichita

Visibility as Repair: Reading Bucharest’s Hidden Layer

Discussion

15:15–15:30 — Coffee Break

15:30–17:10 — PANEL 3

Critical Cartographies: Peripheries, Ordinary Spaces and Hybrid Territories

Guiding question

How can alternative forms of mapping and visual inquiry make peripheral, informal and ordinary territories legible without reducing the complexity of the lives, practices and systems that produce them?

Chair: Maria Neto

Papers

Paulo Moreira

Counter-Mapping as Reparative Practice: Introducing 3D Voice and the Politics of Spatial Representation in Stjwetla, Johannesburg

Francisca Machado & Eduardo Fernandes

Repairing with Memory: Informal Practices and the Rehabilitation of the Ilha da Bela Vista

Francisco Côrte

Food and Leisure: Visual Practices for Mending the City/Countryside Relationship

Visual Essays

Ana Brandão & João Cunha Borges

Mapping Ordinary Public Spaces: A Visual Investigation of Lisbon’s Suburbs

Tomita da Silva

Layers in Motion: Visualizing Hybrid Landscapes on Porto Metropolitan Area’s Northern Seaboard

Discussion

17:10–17:20 — Short Break

17:20–18:45 — PANEL 4

Reparative Practices: Care, Cohabitation and Possible Futures

Guiding question

What does it mean to practise repair — not as the restoration of a previous condition, but as the creation of new relations of care, recognition, cohabitation and possibility?

Chair: Raquel Paulino

Papers

Mounira Zennia

“Public Use” – Strategies of Repair in Cameron Rowland’s Amt 45 i

Filipe Lourenço

Architecture as Identity Repair: Visibility, Practice, and Post-Independence Algeria (1962–1979)

António Olivera

Speculative Repair and Urban Dysfunction: A Wittgensteinian Reading of the Contemporary City through Lisbon

Visual Essay

Anna Positano / Corpi Idrici / Gaia Cambiaggi

Underground Habitats and Post-Industrial Ecosystems

Discussion

18:45–19:00 — Closing Remarks and Final Synthesis

Cristina Gastón & Hugh Campbell

Guest Editors

Ana Miriam Rebelo, Maria Neto & Raquel Paulino

Editors

26 September — Parallel Programme: From Research to the Public and Editorial Realm

On the second day, the conference, held in the auditorium of the Culture Centre, Technical University of Porto — UTP, opens up to a more editorial, professional and public dimension, extending the scientific discussions through two encounters dedicated to photography, architecture, publishing and the construction of cultural legacies.

The morning begins with LFA Talks — Publishing an Award, Extending a Legacy, dedicated to the publication LFA Award: A Contemporary Look at Architecture and to the ways in which an international photography award can move beyond the competitive moment to generate an archive, publishing projects, critical debate and cultural continuity.

Moderated by Jorge Sobrado, the conversation will bring together Hugh Campbell, Cristina Gastón, Judit Torres and Gabriel Hernández.

This will be followed by A City for Everyone | Seeing Photography, with Aníbal Lemos and José Manuel Rodrigues, in a conversation devoted to the relationships between photography, architecture, society and the human experience of the city, with Olívia Marques da Silva proposed as moderator.

Programme — 26 September 2026

09:30–09:35 — Opening of the Parallel Programme

Olívia Marques da Silva

Culture Centre, Technical University of Porto — UTP / FMAD / ID+

A brief introduction to the programme for the conference’s second day and its relationship to the public, editorial and cultural dimensions of Landscapes of Repair.

09:35–09:45 — LFA Award 2026–27 | Presentation of the 2nd Edition

Pedro Leão Neto

Presentation of the 2nd edition of the Luis Ferreira Alves Photography Award — A Contemporary Look at Architecture, whose Open Call officially launched on 25 September 2026, introducing the award’s international framework and objectives, the new cycle of submissions, and the associated programme of prizes, exhibition, publication and dissemination.

09:45–11:10 — LFA Talks — Publishing an Award, Extending a Legacy

Moderator: Jorge Sobrado

Guests:

Hugh Campbell

Cristina Gastón

Judit Torres

Gabriel Hernández

11:10–11:30 — Coffee Break

11:30–13:00 — A City for Everyone | Seeing Photography

Aníbal Lemos and José Manuel Rodrigues

Proposed moderator: Olívia Marques da Silva

13:00–14:30 — Lunch Break

From the Conference to the Territory — Visit to Quinta da Conceição

During the afternoon, the conference moves from the Culture Centre to Quinta da Conceição, in Matosinhos, shifting the discussion from theoretical and visual reflection towards a situated observation of the territory.

14:30 — Departure for Quinta da Conceição

15:00–17:30 — Study Visit — Quinta da Conceição | From Heritage Object to Civic Landscape: Architecture, Use, Maintenance and Repair

17:30 — Closing of the Conference on Site

The visit proposes an understanding of Quinta da Conceição not simply as a heritage ensemble, but as a living civic landscape, where historic heritage, modern architecture, public space, vegetation, water, everyday uses and processes of maintenance continually intersect.

By concluding in the field, the conference establishes a direct relationship between critical visibility and experience, while also anticipating some of the questions that will structure the next thematic cycle of Sophia Journal: how might we learn to repair through attentiveness to place, visual research, situated pedagogies and a collective responsibility towards the spaces we inhabit?

Sophia Journal: Research, Image and International Debate

Sophia Journal has increasingly established itself as an international forum for research and critical debate at the intersections between architecture, photography, film and other visual practices.

Its international conferences reinforce this dimension, creating opportunities for encounters between researchers, architects, artists, photographers, students and professionals from different geographical and disciplinary contexts, in a dialogue closely connected to the journal’s academic and editorial programme.

The abstracts of the contributions presented at the conference will be brought together in an e-book of abstracts, which will also include the conference programme and will be made freely available through the Sophia Journal OJS platform.

Subsequently, the contributions considered most relevant, developed and expanded as full research papers or visual essays and subject to the appropriate editorial and peer-review processes, will be published in:

Sophia Journal — Volume 11, No. 1

Landscapes of Repair: The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair

Through this 11th International Conference, Sophia Journal seeks to create a space in which critical memory, visual research and design imagination can converge around an increasingly urgent question: how can we recognise what needs to be repaired, and how might architecture and images contribute to new forms of attention, care and collective responsibility?

For further information:

info.sophiajournal@arq.up.pt