Difficult Relationships Between Maps And The Landscape

The landscape is everything a map fails to grasp of the world and to express in terms of the separation between subject and object, placing some distance between them.

- Franco Farinelli

Let’s say it right away: the landscape, the form of a place, is everything that a map, i.e space, fails to grasp. It is everything that escapes spatial capture. The landscape is a limitless question, its existence posing the problem of how there can be a whole that is visible but lacks boundaries and so cannot be measured. For this very reason, it raises a problem that is very hard to resolve: that of totality. This serves, however, to differentiate the landscape from all the other models applicable to the Earth which are, on the contrary, by their very nature circumscribed and with which people have casually and hurriedly been tending to equate it for some time. Landscape, area and space are not bodies of things but ways of portraying them. In the language of Gottlob Frege, the father of contemporary analytic philosophy, they do not correspond to the meaning of Earth (which is the Earth itself; the meaning is the thing) but to its sensations, to the various specific ways in which the Earth presents itself; how it gives itself. Each of these ways stems from a specific intention, a different form of historically determined collective will; it obeys a gaze that upholds a different project from the existing one.