image – sign – relevance

Contrary to Foucault´s position concerning the radical distinction between the visible and the readable, the map is immediately both readable and visible. It functions like a non-mimetic image, an image-index (Pierce), that lies at the origin of a pragmatic of expression. A toponym, such as Paris or Berlin, is localized, and corresponds to a referential and contextual territory, a country, a fragment of a country or a planisphere.

 

From then on, the map became a mere artifact, and it is easy to understand the fascination it inspired in the first artist cartographers, Leonardo da Vinci or Dürer. The map seizes the real, masters it, and allows a glimpse of an unconscious quality of vision with its folding and unfoldings, within a weightless plane. A map takes possession of the limits and the borders of the unlimited.

This is why these new visibilities that are distinct from the perspectivist schema with its point of view, combine several heterogeneous elements. It is a “descriptio” connecting images and signs, a new kind of abstraction, that views the diagram as abstract, and that allows for the pluralism of the direction and the displacements characteristic to a world regard, projected onto a continuous or fragmented plane, with all its variations of scale.