Somewhere between what’s seen and what’s imagined lies the city. If it’s concrete matter, at the same time it’s fantasy, the product of narratives that build it in the immaterial dimension of signs.
We know that cartography is an objective discipline, the more successful the greater its ability to accurately represent the mapped object. But how to map fantasy?
To draw subjective maps of cities, we should perhaps take them as protagonists of our stories, rather than just scenarios. This means turn storytelling into an architecture built out of words – a conjectural, physically impossible object –, expanding the possibilities of spatial thinking, going beyond – and overcoming – the materiality of existent things.
Working as a reverse of a typical design tool – focused in representing objects’ visible parts – literature can reveal what one can’t see in them, seeking for the “unseen” that lurks between the layers of the visible. There lie, hidden, the narratives waiting to be written.