Search Results (26)

This article emerges from a researcher-generated longitudinal photography project conducted between 2016 and 2025 situated on the redundant site of the former Middleton Tuberculosis Hospital in North Yorkshire. The research project explored the site’s transformation through an unmanaged rewilding in the context of surrounding dairy farms within the Nidderdale ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’. The hospital site is reimagined as a bucolic ‘island’ stranded in the ideological socio-cultural notions embedded in “Nature”, the countryside, and agricultural landscape under increasing pressure to value biodiversity and nature’s restoration. Employing a reflexive lyrical critical lens informed by ‘resonance theory’, social semiotics, and expressive visual sociological practice, the article contributes to the debates surrounding landscape valorization, the contestation of the ‘countryside’ as a working, and recreational landscape. Researcher-generated photographic practice captures the duration of iterative site visits, the seasonal atmosphere and potential experience of resonance of the site, providing vivid sources for reflections, meaning-making, while proselytizing the axiom of Kress, that: ‘without frame no meaning’. The key research questions are: (1) Why is researcher-generated photography, amid AI image production, an effective epistemological method for re-presenting and understanding the significance of unmanaged landscape rewilding? (2) How do photographic re-presentations and lyrical reflexivity convey the lived resonance of being in places like the Middleton Hospital site? The text rejects illustrative photographic use in academic discourse, favoring an expressive, allusive, and lyrical interpretation of rewilding’s socio-cultural value. Full article

This article examines the role of visual and plastic art as a key instrument for constructing and interpreting cultural space. The study synthesizes a corpus of diverse theoretical works on the interaction between art and landscape, systematizes the principal issues within the field, and proposes avenues for further discussion. It investigates how art not only reflects but also physically, visually, and semantically transforms the landscape. Functioning as a mediator between spiritual, material, and symbolic realities, art creates distinctive forms of spatial experience. Through artistic practices, the aesthetics of a landscape are formed, along with visual and semantic codes, and new centers and loci that alter the perception of the environment. On a theoretical level, the research draws upon the semiotics of space, the philosophy of art, and the concept of landscape as text. The mechanisms through which landscape is endowed with meaning—via architecture, sculpture, painting, and literature—are examined, with a focus on narrative and symbolic modes of artistic interpretation. Particular attention is paid to art as a tool for shaping cultural memory, from memorial complexes to heritage museums, which become spaces of a different temporality and “reservations” of meaning. The cultural landscape is a site of interaction between the sacred and the profane, tradition and innovation, and elite and mass art. Art forms the codes for reading the landscape, translating visual characteristics—color, form, the vertical, the horizontal—into the realm of cultural significance. Thus, art is presented as a form of world reconstruction: an instrument for the spiritual and semantic appropriation of space, one that transforms the landscape into a text perpetually rewritten by culture. Full article

Southeast Asia has historically been shaped by the Indian subcontinent, China and the Middle East, due to civilizational contact. For several centuries, current-day Indonesia and the Malay world experienced extended periods of Hinduization and Indianization. The once-thriving Hinduism/Buddhism-dominated culture gradually gave way to Islam when the area became Islamized. Indonesia now is believed to have the largest number of Muslims in the world. While the Islamic aspects of Indonesia are well-documented in recent scholarship, the country’s Hindu/Buddhist past remains significantly under-explored, especially as far as the linguistic and semiotic landscape is concerned. Conceptualizing linguistic/semiotic landscape as a polyphonic site and a ‘palimpsest’ that is often historically (re)written and constantly updated, this interdisciplinary study documents and reveals the concrete material traces of Hinduism/Indianness evidenced in Jakarta’s linguistic and semiotic landscape at different levels (e.g., various Sanskrit/Hinduism-related place names, slogans and mottos, portrayals of Vishnu, Garuda, Hanuman, Ganesha and depictions of scenes from Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata). Aiming to explore how elements of Hinduism/Indianness may manifest in Indonesia in such cross-region linguistic and religious (re)contextualization across time and space, this study contributes to linguistic and semiotic landscape research, sociolinguistics, Indonesia and Malay studies, Hindu studies, religious studies, Southeast Asia studies and beyond: Full article

Street art increasingly reshapes aesthetic hierarchies by introducing previously marginalised media into the public sphere. A compelling example is the artistic practice of the Polish artist NeSpoon (Elżbieta Dymna), whose work merges the visual language of traditional lace with the communicative strategies of contemporary urban art. Active since the late 2000s, NeSpoon combines stencils, ceramic lace imprints, and large-scale murals to translate the intimacy of handcraft into the visibility of public space. Her works function as both aesthetic interventions and acts of civic pedagogy. This study employs a qualitative visual research design combining multi-site digital inquiry, iconological and semiotic analysis, and mini focus group (N = 22). Three purposefully selected cases: Łódź, Belorado, and Fundão, were examined to capture the site-specific and cultural variability of lace murals across Europe. The analysis demonstrates that lace functions as an agent of cultural negotiation and a medium of heritage literacy, understood here as embodied and place-based learning. In Łódź, it monumentalises textile memory and women’s labour embedded in the city’s industrial palimpsest. In Belorado, micro-scale responsiveness operates, strengthening the local semiosphere. In Fundão, lace enters an intermedial dialogue with azulejos, negotiating the boundary between craft and art while expanding local visual grammars. The study introduces the conceptualisation of the monumentalisation of intimacy in public art and frames heritage literacy as an embodied, dialogic, and community-oriented educational practice. Its implications extend to feminist art history, place-based pedagogy, urban cultural policy, and the preventive conservation of murals. The research elucidates how domestic craft once confined to the private interior operates in public space as a medium of memory, care, and inclusive aesthetics. Full article

Commemorative gardens—particularly those shaped by classical arboreal symbolism—offer underexplored potential for sustainable destination planning. This study investigates how evergreen species such as laurel, cypress, and holm oak function as cultural signifiers in historic cemeteries, contributing to ecological resilience, civic education, and ethical tourism. Through a qualitative, transdisciplinary methodology combining site observation, symbolic analysis, and landscape semiotics, the paper examines three Florentine memorial sites: Santa Croce, the English Cemetery, and the Florence American Cemetery. Each represents a distinct commemorative paradigm—national, cosmopolitan, and transnational—yet all employ a vegetated design to inscribe memory within a landscape. The findings reveal how these gardens foster slow, multisensory visitor engagement while anchoring cultural identity and biodiversity, with participatory stewardship and symbolic vegetation emerging as key factors in transforming cemeteries into living heritage infrastructures. By tracing the evolution of commemorative landscapes from Greco–Roman groves to Romantic and modern garden cemeteries, the study illuminates their enduring capacity to mediate memory, ecology, and place. The paper argues that integrating symbolic literacy and environmental care into tourism policy can generate meaningful, low-impact visitor experiences. Florence exemplifies how commemorative gardens, rooted in ancient codes yet adaptable to contemporary needs, can serve as ethical blueprints for resilient, inclusive, and culturally legible destinations. Full article

Lord Byron’s life and poetic works have inspired musical compositions across genres even during his lifetime. The English author’s fictional characters and themes impressed nineteenth-century European composers, especially since his Byronic heroes were often conflated with their creators’ own melancholy and revolutionary personas. In contrast to Byron-inspired songs and operas, instrumental programme music has raised doubts towards a direct correlation with its poetic sources. While epigraphs help direct listeners to specific ideas, their absence has prompted dismissals of intermedial relationships, even those proposed by the composers themselves. This essay explores major connections between Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, a Symphony in Four Parts with Viola Obbligato (premiered 1834), and Byron’s semi-autobiographical narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: A Romaunt (published 1812–1818). Although Berlioz’s titles and memoirs partially identify Byron’s Childe Harold as his inspiration, other references, including his visits to the Abruzzi mountains, his fascination with Italian folk music, his reuse of earlier material, and his reflections on brigands and solitude, have fuelled ongoing debates about the work’s programmatic content. Combining historical-biographical research, melopoetics, and musical semiotics, this essay clarifies how indefinite elements were transmitted from poetic source to musical target. Particular focus is placed on the “Harold theme”, which functions as a Byronic microcosm: a structural, thematic, and gestural condensation of Byron’s poem into music. Observing the interactions between microcosmic motifs and macrocosmic forms in Berlioz’s symphony and their poetic analogues, this study offers a new reading of how Byron’s legacy is encoded in musical terms. Full article

The Swedish National Curriculum for Preschools states that “the environment in the preschool should inspire and challenge children to broaden their abilities and interests without being constrained by gender stereotyped perceptions”. The aim of a three-year research and development (R&D) project was to both analyse and recreate early childhood education and care (ECEC) units’ indoor spaces, aiming at creating an indoor educational environment that would be socially inclusive and norm-aware, and support preschools to fulfil their curricular assignment around gender equality. The aim of this article is to present a specific process for challenging the norms around certain indoor play places and spaces as well as pieces of furniture in ECEC settings that risk reproducing gender norms. This aim was achieved through a social semiotic multimodal gender analysis of so-called “kitchen furniture”, as a well-established, commonly occurring space in ECEC. The process of how this was challenged is presented in this article. A gender analysis of what affordances for play this kitchen-focused piece of furniture gives, and how it can be recreated, was conducted. The introduction of more inclusive furniture to the ECEC units, through creating and building a play trolley, could affect children’s play in a more inclusive way. The analysis addressed both this idea and teachers’ self-initiated move of the piece of furniture within the ECEC unit. The process was performed with a multidimensional perspective of understanding play as a combination of children’s meaning-making and the affordances of both relationships and the environment. Full article

The present research focuses on buildings’ names and commercial signs analysis as an important component of Bucharest city center semiotics in relation to place identity. Insufficient studies have focused on the direct relationship between commercial signs and place identity, and no scientific approaches in this sense have been identified at Bucharest level. The buildings’ names and commercial signs used as case studies are from the second part of the 19th century until the present. The profound economic and social changes that have taken place in Bucharest during more than 150 years are reflected in the findings. Relying on a complex methodology, a typology framing the case studies identified in the field highlights situations that are not necessarily in accord with the passage of time, but rather with certain city planning decisions and in relation to space use. The novelty of this paper lies in the investigation of some components of Bucharest city center that tend to be forgotten, providing in the end information in relation to their degree of appreciation and therefore preservation, or on the contrary, abandonment and loss. In this complex approach, the role of territorial actors involved in actions such as inventory, framing, and finding preservation solutions is discussed. Full article

This study examines the design and utilization of shared streets in the Jiefangbei Business District of Chongqing through the lens of geographical semiotics. Employing photo content analysis, video observation, and questionnaire surveys, this research delves into visual semiotics, place semiotics, and users’ interaction order, including social interactions and traffic experiences within these shared spaces. The findings reveal that two distinct systems guide pedestrians and vehicles on Jiefangbei’s shared streets, ensuring safety and cultural expression. Paving is identified as the most important method for realizing the sharing of space between people and vehicles. Street furniture emphasizes multifunctional composite use and reflects Jiefangbei’s eclectic style since its era as a financial center of the Republic of China, responding to cultural resources and functional positioning. The study also indicates that social functions and public space attributes need enhancement, recommending more greenery and leisure facilities. Interaction order analysis shows that participants’ perception of street sharing does not affect their sense of safety and effectiveness. Thus, future practice should base decisions on specific traffic conditions and urban functions. A limitation of this study is the inability to accurately sample the population structure of the Jiefangbei commercial district, preventing more adaptable conclusions. The authors suggest viewing shared space as an evolving process and recommend future research on long-term effects and cross-cultural comparative studies to provide valuable insights into global shared-street design. Full article

The main goal of this article is to introduce a new method for the analysis of depicted gestures in painting, namely a transcription system called chiroscript. Based on the model of transcription and annotation systems used in linguistics of co-speech gestures and sign languages, it is intended to provide a more systematic and objective study of pictorial gestures, revealing their modes of combination inside chirographic accords. The place of chirograms (depicted hand gestures) within pictorial semiotics will be briefly discussed in order to better explain why a transcription system is very much needed and how it could expand art historical perspectives. Pictorial gestures form an understudied language-like system which has the potential to increase the intelligibility of paintings. We argue that even though transcription is not a common practice in art history, it may contribute and even transform semiotic analyses of figurative paintings. Full article

The investigation of linguistic landscapes (LL) among the Arab community in downtown Brooklyn, New York City, is an underserved public space in the literature. This research focused on social and commercial or ‘bottom-up signs’ in LL to understand their purpose, origin and target audience. Drawing upon discourse analysis, the study was conceptualized according to the principles of border theory and geosemiotics. The latter was used to analyze the data, which consisted of random photographs of shopfronts in Brooklyn taken with a digital camera during the summer of 2016. The three semiotic aggregates used for analysis consisted of interaction order, visual and place semiotics. The data analysis showed the multi-layered nature of LL in this urban community and the subjectiveness of spatial borders through a combination of text and symbolic imagery. The paper highlights the importance of commercial signs in the LL among ethnic minority communities. Full article

Displayed in a Kansas City neighborhood with a history of blockbusting, Nick Cave’s 14-channel video installation Hy-Dyve confronted viewers with a visceral sense of entrapment in traumatizing spaces of racism. The immersive environment portrayed deeply moving experiences of confinement and concealment, connecting narratives of the Middle Passage to present fears of racial profiling. Shown at different scales on the dilapidated walls of a deconsecrated church, the video images enabled visitors to sense what it feels like to be exposed to a scrutinizing and categorizing gaze. Building on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of close-up operations, I explore how Cave both showcases and subverts the visual rhetoric of surveillance, inviting viewers to suspend processes of individuation and embrace alterity. I offer a semiotic analysis of the visual motifs in Hy-Dyve and show how their unstable meanings heighten the potential for immersion in conjunction with the projection mapping technique. The entanglement of video images with crumbling architectural features destabilizes perception and fosters reflection on the imbrication of past and present realities of racial discrimination. Placing Hy-Dyve in the broader context of Cave’s body of work, I suggest that it conjoins two different sides of his practice: a post-black approach to issues of identity which is consonant with his Soundsuits and a more radical activist stance which addresses the particularities of black experience and the burdening history of racial abuse. Full article

Apart from interactivity, representativeness (in the meaning of grandness) is the basic and required characteristic of public open spaces. The representativeness of public open spaces (POS) is understood in terms of their ability to portray cities and their inhabitants as a whole. This study considers the historical value of public spaces and determines their contemporary role as spaces for representing cities. Moreover, we explore the relationship between the natural value of such places and their representativeness function. It was necessary to define the criteria determining the representativeness of public spaces, including their physical, semiotic, and functional features. The study was carried out in the midtown zone of Szczecin. The subject of the study is urban landscape objects. The landscape, according to the definition presented by the European Landscape Convention, is part of the land, as perceived by local people and visitors, which evolves through time as a result of being acted upon by natural forces and human beings. The landscape approach used in this research enables an assessment that requires taking into account and comparing many aspects that build the layers of the landscape. Qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to assess the characteristics that distinguish POS in the symbolic, formal, location-related and functional layers and to examine their ecological value. The results of the study generally confirmed our hypothesis: i.e., embedding the studied POS within the city’s tradition—with its strong semiotic connections and with the specific history of the place (genius loci)—increases the space’s range of contemporary, representative functions. At the same time, an apparent decrease in the prestige of the studied POS was observed. Although they originally had high historical value, they either lost key artifacts constituting that identity or were excluded from the main functional and compositional axes of the city. Moreover, this study proves that the representativeness of POS, conditioned by historical value and contemporary functional, spatial, and location features, is generally inconsistent with their high natural value. Still, this inconsistency does not have to be a mean contradiction. Full article

The paper analyses Peirce’s hypoiconicity through the lens of Husserlian intentionality. Peirce’s triple structure of hypoiconicity as resemblance relation, diagrammatical reasoning and metaphoric displacement is shown to require intentional acts in its production and interpretation. Regarding hypoiconicity as a semiotic schematization of Vorstellung, the paper places it in the context of Husserl’s conception of intentionality in which iconicity appears as a stepping-stone towards the skeletonization of resemblance in diagrammatical abstraction and as schematic displacement in metaphor. As such, hypoiconic intentionality is argued to play a role also in Peirce’s community conception of language. The paper’s core claim is that intentionality provides an avenue for revealing hypoiconicity as a major, critical concept of semiotics, functioning as paradigm case for investigating the convergence of semiotics and phenomenology. Full article

In light of new discoveries of his writings, recent studies on the medieval Japanese monk Yōsai (or Eisai; 1141–1215) have moved away from longstanding preoccupations with his role in establishing Zen in Japan and instead stress his career-long orientation as an esoteric Buddhist monk of the Tendai school. Although these revisions have led to innovative readings of his promotion of tea in the first fascicle of his Record of Nourishing Life by Drinking Tea (Kissa yōjōki), similar approaches have yet to be attempted for the second fascicle of this well-known work, in which Yōsai argues for the apotropaic efficacy of mulberry against pathogenic demons. In this article, I seek to remedy this gap firstly by situating Yōsai’s healing program within broader contemporary trends in esoteric ritual healing. Examining the place of mulberry across esoteric liturgical discourse reveals a rich semiotic network in which the tree was tied to three other key ritual and medicinal materials: milkwood, milk, and the bodhi tree. In the second half of the article, I explore the ways that Yōsai’s argument for mulberry’s efficacy was shaped by an “exoteric” source, namely the biography of Śākyamuni Buddha. In this way, my analysis of the Kissa yōjōki provides insight into the interplay of “esoteric” and “exoteric” elements in Yōsai’s thought and career, even as attention to the specificity of his therapeutic claims for mulberry encourages us to move beyond sectarian frameworks. Full article