ABSTRACT
This chapter centres on the recognition of maps as individuals with lives and temporalities of their own. To indirectly grasp the cartographic object as it times, I adopt in an unusual way a technique well known in the geographical field: repeat photography. In an era of pervasive mobile mapping practice and real-time interaction, we typically view maps as active, vital agents unceasingly working on the move. This chapter instead deals with adynamic, dormant, out-of-joint, solitary, vandalised, disengaged, decaying, half-dead cartographic objects. Repeat photography and the practice of re-visiting cartographic sites offer ways to ‘sense anew’ these maps in the absence of practice by recognising them as recording entities that experience becomings and ‘unbecomings’. The chapter also reports two episodes of cartographic visitation/meditation by geographers Derek McCormack and Caitlin DeSilvey, who wrote about and photographed, respectively, a relief map of a memorial to a tragic expedition hosted in a cemetery and a map devoured by insects in an abandoned site. These episodes are representative of the post-phenomenological style of approaching maps as objects rather than representations, a style that also enlivened my (re)photographic accounts of the unstable life of a marginal, modest map signboard in the city of Padova.
