ABSTRACT
In Nancy's words, “The world is always the plurality of worlds: a constellation whose composability is identical with its fragmentation, the compactness of a powder of absolute fragments.” Unlike the world, the planet is a striated place, not easily subsumed into cosmological theories informed by smooth space leading to a unified metaphysical image: it is the earth in its material concreteness, liberated from metaphorical descriptions. Artists working according to the various modes of poetic cartography are aware of the difference between the world and the earth, which had been articulated by Heidegger in the 1930s. In particular, contemporary artists engaging with poetic cartography have addressed the relevance of mythical and personal narratives, alongside the use of formal aspects of mapping and cartography, with the intent to shed light on current social and political issues related to place, dwelling, and home(less)ness. The “double becoming” where deterritorialization and reterritorialization meet is the locus where the cartographic imagination resides as well.
