In "Urban-Nature Archives: Spatial Practices of Futurity in Brazilian Amazonia" Junia focuses on the data collected from her research on photographic archives, more specifically on the personal collection of who registered various transformations in the Brazilian Amazon since the 1980s. These images, juxtaposed with other documents, constitute 鈥榰rban-nature archives鈥 that can bring out ways of seeing that restore certain practices not as ruins of vernacular modes of life that have been extinguished but rather as futurity, following Fred Moten, that present alternative ways for facing the Anthropocene/Capitalocene and the environmental crisis.
Junia Mortimer is an architectural and urban historian who works on the crossways of visual culture, social history of architecture and urban studies, focusing on spatial and building practices within photographic archives. She is currently working as an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the and is also faculty of the . She is a self-taught photographer and holds a Bachelor鈥檚 in Architecture and Urbanism (UFMG, 2007), a Master鈥檚 in Arts and Humanities (Erasmus Mundus Scholarship/UPVD, 2010) and a PhD in Architecture (NPGAU/UFMG, 2015), with a doctoral internship at the Cooper Union, in NYC. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UFMG in 2019, and a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2023.
She is the author of the books Arquiteturas do Olhar (2017) and Salvador anos 70 (2024), and co-organized the books Entre imagem e escrita (2020) and Desvios da Arquitetura (2023). She also wrote a number of papers for scientific journals, such as 鈥溾 (2020), and curated exhibitions, such as Urbanos Arquivos (2023) in Salvador. Her work is dedicated to urban studies and the history and theory of architecture, with an emphasis on visual culture through photographic archives. She is on the coordination team of the and of the research group Archives, Sources and Narratives.