Was It the Wind? Listening to Photographs at the Edge of the Urban

Prof. Junia Cambraia Mortimer
Thursday 05/11, 13.00
Amphitheater and ONLINE

Every photograph begins with a sound: the dry click of the shutter, which claims to close time and turn life into an archive. But the click closes nothing. In a society saturated with images, photographs lose thickness. They slide past, pile up and flatten the worlds they show. This lecture turns from looking at images to listening to them.

Drawing on Ariella Azoulay, Christina Sharpe, Tina Campt and Fred Moten, it works through three archives: a 1950s family album from Salvador, the Afro-photographic archive Zumvi, and Roberto Monte-Mór's photographs of the Amazon frontier in the 1980s. It asks who held the camera, who goes unnamed, and what we start to hear once the eye reaches its limit. Sound, cutting, clay and conversation become ways of researching the urban otherwise: seeing with rather than looking at.

Junia Cambraia Mortimer is an architect, urbanist and photographer, and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Design of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. She is also a collaborating professor in the Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), where she taught from 2015 to 2024. In 2025–2026 she was an International Fellow of the Urban Studies Foundation at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, and in 2023 she was a visiting scholar in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She holds a degree in Architecture and Urbanism (UFMG, 2007), an Erasmus Mundus MA in European Humanities from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and the Université de Perpignan (2010), and a PhD in Architecture and Urbanism (UFMG, 2015), with a doctoral stay at The Cooper Union in New York under Anthony Vidler. Her work addresses extended urban-nature, the image and the archive across practical, theoretical and historiographical dimensions. She is the author of Arquiteturas do olhar (2017) and co-editor of Entre imagem e escrita: Aracy Esteve Gomes e a cidade de Salvador (2020). With Roberto Luís Monte-Mór she develops "urban-nature archives" as a sensory practice of history for rethinking extended urbanization in Brazilian Amazonia (JOVIS, 2025; Urban Studies, 2026). She leads the Laboratory of Image and Architecture Studies (LEIA/CNPq), is vice-leader of the research group "Arquivos, fontes, narrativas" (FAU-USP), and is a member of the Cosmópolis group (UFMG).

In the framework of the course EKTOS POLIS: Researching the Urban Otherwise - Wanderings across Extended Urbanisation

Image: Collage by Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá. Photographs by Roberto Monte-Mór and Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá.