Verbal Space and Visual Space Between Reality and Immagination

The essay addresses the problem of the conditions and limits of translatability of verbal expression into graphics, through the use of literary passages by different authors concerning the imagined and/or physical space. The mimesis in representation and the semantic values of languages are the central topic and the attention is focused on the literary descriptions of architecture, the city and the landscape found in the novels and essays of our time: for example Jorge Luis Borges, Iosif Brodskij, Italo Calvino, John M. Hull, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Massimo Scolari, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. In fiction, the written ‘illustrations’ of houses or urban and territorial contexts are uncountable. Words have the power to evoke the real world, to establish associations between the complexity of forms and the ways of their representation, to anticipate and direct the use of both the expressive power of images and the codified tools of drawing: just think of the way in which Aldo Sestini links the cartographic drawing to the textual description. The research develops the production of graphic representations conducted with figurative and/or abstract codes starting from mental images evoked by written narratives: from illustrations by Édouard Riou for Jules Verne’s novels to Karina Puente’s works on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The goal is to focus on the constraints and potential inherent in the work of translating texts into figures, also to verify the increase in the effectiveness of the message generated by the mutual influence between the word and the sign.