Mapping coexistence in Italy: Reshaping the cartographic feelings of the plural nation

Kartat liikkeessä

“…Lo Presti argumentoi, että juuri tällaisten jokapäiväisten aineistojen avulla imperiumista tuli kuviteltavissa oleva kokonaisuus: "imperiumi muuttuu käsitteestä käytännöksi hetkenä, jolloin sitä kulutetaan" eli sen kanssa ollaan tekemisissä esimerkiksi kartan muodossa. 10 Erilaiset tuotteet loivat imperiumille kartografisia elämiä.…”

Reimagining the national map

“…In a few days, about 300 people with different political orientations and from different parts of the country uploaded their own creative maps, expressing ambivalent feelings of national belonging with respect to migration issues and internal divisions of the country (Figure 1). On a semiotic level, readers, in fact, used different graphic and textual artifices to convey or criticise the cultural and spatial-oriented diversity celebrated by Renzo Piano, as emerged through the inductive visual content analysis of this cartographic corpus made by one of the authors (Lo Presti, 2021). 2 Drawing on the richness of perspectives and emotional registers expressed by such pictorial maps, in this section, we evidence the heuristic potential that the inventive practice of remapping the nation holds for providing alternative insights over the alleged cultural uniformity of the country.…”

Embracing the plurality of the carto-sphere

“…Rossetto and Lo Presti’s (2021) aim ‘to promote an alternative understanding of the national map as a sensitive tool of pluralism in multicultural societies’ is valuable because it challenges how we have come to think about maps as objects of disciplinary rather than emancipatory potential. This follows a longstanding aim of counter-mapping (see, for example, the counter-cartographies collective, 3 Louis et al, 2012; Sletto et al, 2020) to use maps to challenge the status quo of spatiality and usher in more equitable futures, but frames it differently by putting it into conversation with national maps, which are generally regarded in opposition to those produced in counter-mapping projects.…”

“…Instead, we are encouraged to consider maps as objects and representations that have the potential to shape a myriad of practices, actions, and affects in the world. I view the pervasiveness of national cartographies, highlighted by Rossetto and Lo Presti in their article and their other work (see Lo Presti, 2021;Rossetto, 2019), as a further invitation for critical cartographers to examine the as-yet-known (by the discipline, at least) ways that national cartographies become bound up in ordinary and extraordinary practices. The provocation foregrounds the idea that we should not necessarily treat national maps as a single object of analysis, no matter how common the cartographic form is.…”