Movescapes. Geografie del movimento fra spazio e rappresentazione

Abstract

This project has three main aims. First, it seeks to rethink space and spatiality from movement. To do this it follows some significant steps of philosophical tradition (Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, Derrida, etc.) in an attempt to demonstrate the close relation between the movement of body and the production of space. No space would exist without an original movement producing it: the body comes out of himself, it spaces, and it is precisely in this dislocation that the spatiality is brought into being (Merleau Ponty). Bodies in motion produce space, but what happens if these bodies fall between the lines of a text or on the planes of a map? Can representational spaces hold the movement on their surfaces? Which kind of dynamic configurations writing and mapping are able to produce? Which limits and potentialities the representation of movement activates in its verbal or visual translation? These question open up a new space of reflection, that is the core of the second part of the doctoralproject. Answering to these questions needs the investigation of those landscapes that movement produces through words and images (movescapes), following hands that run along the lines of the text or across the cartographic grid, and gazes that travel through the spaces of writing and mapping. The third purpose, then, is to make a collection of texts and maps that give an account of the extraordinary variety of possibilities that the representation of movement unfold. To do so I will try to find in visual art and literature those movescapes that refuse and overthrow the traditional patterns whichwe are used to. These counter-representations open up a radical space of dissemination (Derrida), where there is no place for transparent meanings and universalistic claims, but only for differences and dislocations.