Cartography Of Intangible

Edge of Humanity Magazine

2 years ago

Photographer Giuseppe Satriani is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Cartography of Intangible ’. To see Giuseppe’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Isidora – The city that makes wishes a memory

Why and What Cartography of Intangible means to me

A paper map is much more than a projection of physical geography, because, once you have visited the places represented there, a paper map allows you to create an emotional map of the place, in which to note down impressions, memories, smells, noises, events, meetings, surprises, and the unexpected. In this way, the map stops being based solely on spatial coordinates, to add a new dimension based on the coordinates of one’s own experience, thus defining an emotional and personal geography that transforms the place into “our place”.

I believe Italo Calvino kept this in mind when he wrote “Invisible Cities” (this series has been inspired by this book). When Marco Polo told Kublai Khan about the cities he had visited on his travels throughout his empire, he did nothing but open his own emotional cartography and share it with the Tartar emperor who remained fascinated by Marco Polo’s experience. The emotional cartography told by the protagonist in a process of emotional fusion between experience and geography, became even more tangible to the emperor’s imagination because Marco Polo associated a woman’s name with each of the cities visited.

In the series, my maps are metaphors of invisible cities and real women that merge following ordered grids, to offer themselves in a cartography of the intangible that wants to trace the experience of the journey through the story of the nostalgia of that experience.

Behind the scenes of Cartography of Intangible

I created on white A4 sheets of paper, grid models made with sticks and other natural materials found on beaches or woods. I scanned them.
To obtain different ethnic woman portraits I selected a set of women portraits in my photo archive, and I transformed each of them supported by an AI generation tool.
To obtain the maps included in the series, I applied the same process used with portraits by using the scanned grids as input plus the support of AI generative tool to transform grids into maps
All the previous steps with the intention to visualize the representation of the “women towns” described by Calvino in Invisible Cities
I made a first selection of images and improved each of them in Photoshop: composition, lighting, contrast and color. I generated 3 galleries of 12 different images to try out different combinations and different rhythms for the series, ultimately arriving at a series of 12 images + 2 reserves that I made consistent in tone, lighting, contrast and color, to create a visual dialogue.