Cartography #11

Issue 11 of Cartography. 

Notes from the publisher:

CELESTIAL PRELUDE. IN THE STUDIO OF ANSELM KIEFER WITH VINCENZO TRIONE

You walk, and it is like losing yourself among a painter’s dreams and intentions. In Croissy, you grasp the sense of what remains our ineliminable, almost ontological condition: our condemnation to be in the project. Every person’s life is always marked by that tendency to plan, discuss, cancel, revise and rehash hypotheses, which leads to a parallel and heterogenous dimension, disconnected and out of sync with the normal passing of time. They are pre-viewing exercises, which remove us from the temptations of the finite and the obligations of communication. Proposals that aim to change the linear rhythm of the world, announcing a possible, different future.

UZBEK BLAZE. SHORT STORY BY LUCIE AZEMA WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY HASSAN KURBANBAEV

This is the landscape that attracted me like a lover to central Asia. I remember the geography lessons at school when we had to colour the seas blue, the mountains red, the savannah green and… the steppes? Hm, what colour? Yellow maybe. My imagination painted the steppes with a big, yellow brush. As it turns out, I wasn’t so far off. 

LUCIE AZEMA IN CONVERSATION WITH VALENTINA PIGMEI ON THE MEANINGS OF TEA 

Part of tea’s natural baggage is the euphoria of adventure and encounters, yet paradoxically it is drunk in moments of calm, sitting down, suspended in time. Adventure isn’t continual movement in space; there have to be rests, oases. There can be some more difficult moments, breaks that have not been prearranged. This is how tea contains the history of our humanity; and it is this tension between nomadism and sedentariness, which we all have to deal with, that I wanted to explore in L’usage du thé.

ANNA BOGHIGUIAN IN CONVERSATION WITH FRANCESCA VERGA (ON CREATION)  

[If I run out of images] I go to the place where the situation happened. I go to live the situation, not with the imaginary but within the realm of the real. Or I search for an environment that is in a way similar to the situation read in the text. For example, if someone is speaking about the ocean and there are no more images of it in my mind, I physically go to the ocean and watch it. Then I get more images and what to draw becomes clearer to me. 

NOTHING MORE THAN EXISTING. SHORT STORY BY ACHILLE FILIPPONI WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY LUCA DE SANTIS

They do not rest on the ground. Here the houses seem to come out of the earth, like the vertical axis of a pointed cross missing the horizontal piece to finish it off. From the outside they have eyes. Skylights. Pairs of them. If you are inside, they do not protect you. If you are outside, they observe you. 

THE GARDEN OF PIXELS. JOURNEY THROUGH THE MOSAICS OF TIVOLI BY LUCA TREVISANI

In the end, nothing new under the sun in the eternal discourse of reality and how it is represented. But pixels are just the latest, freshest update of a paradigm that is as old as the hills, the art of creating images by combining small pieces, organizing and composing fragmented drawings into arrangements put together in strict order. A pixel is a discrete blotch of colour and light, located at the intersection of a row and a column, just like in crochet, or cross-stitch, or like a tessera in an ancient mosaic, or like flies are thought to see, with their compound reflectors made up of thousands of tiny lenses, each capturing a partial and precise angle of the surrounding space.

ETHICS OF THE WANDERER BY UMBERTO GALIMBERTI 

Unlike travellers who, even when they go to a different place, never step out of their habitual world nor, thus, their habits, wanderers invite us to expose ourselves to the unusual, where it is possible to discover, but only for a night or a day, how the sky spans out over that land, how the night discloses unfamiliar constellations in the sky, how religion congregates hopes, how tradition makes a people, solitude a desert, inscription a history, rivers a meander, land a furrow, in that quick-fire succession of world experiences which elude any attempt to fasten them down and arrange them in an orderly sequence. For wanderers know, beyond every project to, that totality is elusive, that non-sense contaminates sense, that the possible exceeds the real and that every project that attempts to understand and embrace the whole is madness.  

A FRAGMENT. SHORT STORY BY DAVIDE COPPO WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY DELFINO SISTO LEGNANI 

He spends an hour and a half searching the columns for the right niche for his piece to fit into. It’s brick-coloured, and the columns look the same. And then what would he do? Nothing, he tells himself, it’s just to put a piece in its place. After all those years, after thousands of miles, after all those memories. He can’t find it. It’s roasting hot and there are tourists all dressed in white, singing and playing tambourines and climbing the Pyramid of the Sun. He’s got to give up.

LIGHTS IN THE SKY BY FERNANDA MELCHOR 

I kept thinking how lucky it was that Veracruz was outside of the path of totality, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from looking at that perturbing black sun, and that its intense glare would probably melt my eyes like wax, or at least that’s what I imagined.