Maps and intemperie

If we could witness the first graphic representation of a map, we would see that it was made with a stick on the sand. It’s hard for anyone to argue against it. If we used our imagination and attended the scene, we would see several people listening to the explanations given by the author of the first geographical representation about the drawing. We can speculate that these explanations were geared towards survival, revealing where and how to make a hunting expedition or the location of a food source.

In some caves, routes have been found depicted in lines and also in petroglyphs that were made during the Paleolithic and later periods. Archaeologists have identified geographical schematics where they are located, dating the first stone-printed map representations to more than 10,000 years ago. Humans have felt the need to delineate and direct space, imbuing these representations with the ideology that accompanies each map. The reasons for this need have varied (physical, political, religious, commercial, military, etc.), but at the root of all of them, and the most transcendent reason maps have been made since before history began, is communication.

One of the most beautiful reasons we have when we open a map is to reveal the territory, the discovery of new routes that transport us to unknown landscapes. Maps give us clues, inform us of what others previously saw and reflected on a rock, a piece of wood, a paper or a screen. They awaken imagination and entice the traveler. Afterwards, when you have reached the goal of your journey, when you exchange the printed vertical view for the horizontality of your gaze, everything changes: reality is different, it turns off our landscape in the imagination and transforms it into the emotion that pioneers feel when they find each patch of land. It’s not easy to describe it with words, it must be discovered.

Ernesto Cardoso