Wreckscapes
Leonor Carvalho
Conceived as a speculative archive, Wreckscapes explores the emotional and material residues of shipwrecks, not only as historical events but as epistemological fractures where landscapes work as operational images, echoes of sonar sweeps, archival voids and spectral traces between surface and depth. Drawing on forensic aesthetics and underwater archaeology, the book questions the physical, sensory and communal acts needed to access knowledge.
The photobook is a performative space, where the editorial form becomes a site of archaeological reanimation: a submerged archive lit only by the intimacy of touch. Its structure recalls a set of provisionally stored cartographies, ready to be spread out across the horizontality of a table. These cartographies allow alternative readings of submerged landscapes, aware of entropy, memory and new forms of meaning and speculative fiction.
Acoustic, blind images cast shadows through reflection and soundproofing — indirect, skewed images, where sound takes the place of sight. Wreckscapes uses sonar images and a book without text, except on the cover, treating wrecked elements as relics emerging from the darkness of the ocean. Conceived as a folder holding maps of shipwrecks, it is not sewn, allowing the maps to spread out and deconstruct linear reading, proposing alternative ways of making meaning from the images and the visual tension between black and gold foil.
Imprint / Technical Rider:
Year: 2024
Dimensions: 329 × 483 × 8 mm; 12 pages
Materials: White 300 g/m² card; cover in rigid board covered in black cloth.
Production and finishing: Digital metallic gold-foil stamping on white 300 g/m² card, by COLORSHOW; cover in rigid board covered in black cloth, hot-stamped in relief with gold foil using fixed metal type, finished by Ana & Carvalho – Encadernação e Tipografia, Lda.
Resources and credits: Sonar images by Kraken Robotics in collaboration with NOAA Ocean Exploration.
Curricular Unit:
Advanced Studies in Editorial Design and Typography (1st year)
Supervising Professor:
Mário Moura
Keywords: Forensic Cartographies, Shipwreck, Acoustic Images, Haptic Nature