By Elena Corradi
There are many complex connections between the sciences that study space, such as geography and cartography, and memory. Most of our memories are tied to places – everything that happens, happens somewhere – and as “there are no places without history, there are no stories without a place*”. But what happens to memories when the place that contains them no longer exists?
When I began to take an interest in the history of the urban expansion of Palermo I was very struck by the persistence of the myth that evokes a lost paradise, full of citrus trees and nestled between the mountains and the sea, which, for centuries, has made the city known by the name of Conca d’oro. This is also the name that will be given in 2012 to a shopping center, the third largest in all of Sicily, built on a portion of that plain that previously hosted the lush orange and lemon crops. The building is adjacent to the ZEN neighborhood on the northern outskirts of the city. It is a low building with a slightly golden sand yellow color on which tree-towers with vaguely brutalist shapes stand out: but how can a shopping center evoke citrus groves that no longer exist?
This semantic shift, a source of disorientation and at times of deception, pushed me to want to investigate the dynamic relationships between landscape and language, between language and images and to ask myself: how is the toponym “Conca d’oro” interpreted by the young inhabitants of the neighborhood who have not been able to know what was there before? And for those who were there before, what does “Conca d’oro” mean today?
The research will take place in the months of October and November in Palermo and will be based mainly on the use of sound as a form of narration of space. With a group of young inhabitants of ZEN we will try to bring out new perspectives and possible scenarios, starting from a sensitive rereading of the places of everyday life. The participatory approach of the work is very much inspired by the counter-mapping practices developed in the context of what is defined as “radical cartography”. Of feminist and decolonial origin, these experiences are born, in fact, with the intent of operating a fundamental epistemological reversal: appropriating the power inherent in the map to question what we do with space.
Suggested reading
- Nepthys Zwer, Pour un spatio-féminisme. De l’espace à la carte, Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2024
- Laurence Dahan-Gaida, Cartographie et littérature, Presses universitaires de Vincennes, Saint-Denis, 2024
- Giuseppe Mandalà, La Conca d’oro di Palermo. Storia di un toponimo., in Medioevo romanzo 50/1, pp. 1- 32
- Giuseppe Barbera, Il giardino del Mediterraneo. Storie e paesaggi da Omero all’Antropocene, il Saggiatore, Milano, 2021
*Bond M., 2020. “Wayfinding. The Art and Science of How We Find and Lose our Way”, London, Panmcmillian.