Paper short abstract:

Adopting a visual content analysis of maps, this intervention critically investigates multiple creative cartographies of Italy as experiential images for encountering diversity through empathy, negotiating the idea of coexistence and embracing or resisting a sense of plural belonging.

Paper long abstract:

For decades, the national map has been the target of severe criticism that views the cartographic reproduction of the state as one of the most powerful tools for building restricted, homogeneous identities. Nonetheless, within the constantly changing panorama of contemporary mapping practices (educational, every day, activist and artistic) that has been evidenced by the new shift to post-representational cartography (Dodge et al. 2009), the imageries evoked by the figure of the national map emerge in multiple unpredictable, unexplored ways, particularly when revisioning the experience of the national map in light of the mobile, multicultural nature of European societies. Although cartographic national imaginations are more commonly associated with the tendency to dismiss cultural diversity within the framework of exclusionary nationalism, we investigate the consequences of these cartographic imaginaries when they accommodate migrants under the framework of a super-diverse and progressive nationalism. Indeed, today, cartographic images are variously associated with migration and multiple (positive or negative) feelings towards it. In the context of Italy, we examine a visual corpus of 300 creative re-drawings of the nation that readers have submitted online to the newspaper, La Repubblica, in response to a (carto)graphic call by Renzo Piano on the theme of Italy as a cross-cultural Mediterranean space. Empirically drawing on this collective and public cartographic experiment, this contribution offers an alternative carto-centred perspective for further problematising the many feelings that make and remake the sense of uniqueness, plurality, coexistence and solidarity of a nation as a visible, tangible presence.