"Travelling maps". Cartography's Nomadic Languages Across Art, Literature, Politics and Media

After having abandoned any positivistic ideal of transparency and truth, the cartographic image has started to be examined in its opacity, as a cultural text, as a document of our social and cultural history. This critical revaluation of the inherently rhetorical and socially constituted nature of maps, together with the recognition of their mingling with the power and the knowledge control, has made it possible to translate the logic of maps’ production – known with the technical term of mapping – out of the restricted domain of geography, making it applicable to a wide range of subjects of enquiry. Thus, the map emerges – to use Mieke Bal’s famous term – as a «travelling concept». It is a complex semantic structure, a matrix of spatial imagination at the crossroad of scriptura and pictura, table and diagram, that fruitfully travels across different media and languages, translated from one cultural form to another. On the other hand, in the last few decades cartography has progressively imposed itself as a new paradigm of cultural investigation and the tendency to use atlases, maps or diagrams to explain and recast the dynamics, the twists and the developments of cultural production is increasingly widespread among scholars.
The workshop "Travelling Maps". Cartography’s Nomadic Languages Across Art, Literature, Politics and Media aims to extend the research horizons developed in the last years around the cartographic dispositive, to deepen the methodologies of the so called “cartographic turn” and revise its categories of analysis in an interdisciplinary interplay. From many different angles, but focusing together on the cartographic forms of space production and resemantization, different scholars will gather in this forum to share and discuss their perspectives. Some of them have devoted their recent research investigating the affinity and the fertility of the relations which bring the map closer to other codes of world- and space-writing, while others have developed cartographic models of cultural enquiry.