Event

Wednesday 30 October, 19:30h

Franco Farinelli

The End of the New World and the Beginning of Ours: The Return of Geography

This lecture is given on the occasion of the launch of the book Franco Farinelli. Del mapa al laberinto (Franco Farinelli: From Map to Labyrinth) by Bernat Lladó (“Espacios críticos” Collection, Vol. 5, Icaria Editorial, 2013)

Geography is the archetypical knowledge of western culture. In their zeal to represent the world, to draw the globe on a map, geographers laid the foundations of modern scientific knowledge. By means of cartographic projection and the coordinate system they invented space, which is to say the Universal Measure. From this there emerged not only a new experience of territory, but also a new way of organising it: modern states. With globalisation, however, the experience and organisation of modern territory would seem to have come to an end. The functioning of the world is no longer in tune with the logic of the map. In order to escape this logic, Farinelli suggests that we should overcome our fear of the labyrinth, the only flat representation possible of the globe, since it is only from within the labyrinth that we shall be able to understand geography and the world of today (the Web, the virtual domain, landscape and the globe). This is a geography that, henceforth, cannot and must not obey the standpoint dictated by the map but must open itself to the plurality of perspectives and stories.

Franco Farinelli. Del mapa al laberinto is a critical essay on Farinelli and his work and it also includes a selection of basic texts as well as a hitherto unpublished article.