The visual essay that I present appears in a phase
that is temporally distant from the residency period
(December 2021). It results as a need to attribute
visuality, therefore, to show the infinity
of the spatialization of this body and parts
of the books’ texts.

[/] In the final phase of the residency I developed
a sound piece, which materializes a possible
relationship between the books, determined
by the encounter between my body
and its different contents.[\]

[/] From the various arrangements of the books
on the orange floor and on the gray foam plinths,
my movement through space was determined
by the various possibilities of reading the books, and[\]

[/] Upon my arrival at the place, I distributed
books in the space that[\]
[/] was granted to me, books brought
in a suitcase that were in my studio waiting
to be read,[\]
[/] From these brief walks, I brought inside natural
elements that I found, putting them in relation
to some pages of the books.[\]

The microphone, a fixed axis in space,
is the means by which it is possible to hear,
and thus compose a mental image
of the spatialization of this body and contents.
[/] the images in the books, from which
I recognized improvised relationships between
the contents, and from this process, mental
images emerged that I wrote down in parallel.[\]

The readings were paused by walks through the surrounding
natural territory, made possible by the sunshine in between
the periods of rain.
[/] For five days (October 2020) I took part in the artistic
research residency “Expansive Territories”, organized
by the association OSSO (São Gregório, Caldas da Rainha). [\]

[/] around subjects that I research
in my artistic and teaching practice
(ESAD.CR), such as: movement, image,
incorporation, Art, what it means
to teach “Art”, what it is supposed
to teach in “Art”, and the importance
of the curriculum of a subject.[\]
[/]  I recognize in this project the principle
of a method based on the relationship
between artistic practice as research
and teaching practice, aimed at finding
means of visual, sound or spatial
transcription, linked to the creative process. [\]

[/] But not only that.

When we find a place we cannot decode with our incorporated
references, we feel foreign. An invisible distance separates
us from its rhythms, texture, and architecture. OSSO became
a home as soon as I arrived, but I faced the village
of São Gregório as a foreigner.
                                                                                           I went out looking for a place
                                                                                                         where to drink a coffee.
I slammed shut the blue gate and followed in the direction
of a sign with the image of a coffee cup, branded with a Greek
delta, nailed to a post by the road — maybe an old bus stop.
Closer to the post, I saw no coffee shop, just a small private lawn.
I kept on going, up the street walking on the tarmac, since there
were no sidewalks. An open field interrupts the line of houses
and broadens my horizon. Several heavy machines lurk around,
as idle as the dog under a sunshade or the heap of firewood
lying under a makeshift structure.

                                    “Firewood for sale”, I can read on a sign.
In the background, fields unfold down the hills, a composition
of bare earth rectangles and a variety of polygons drawn
by the orderly lines of fruit trees.

                                                                     I keep on cli
The street, which is a road, is now compressed between
two stone and concrete walls, two continuous lines of houses.

There is no one else on the street, the coffee shop is closed.
Through the gaps between the house’s walls,
I can see the cultivated hills spreading in the distance.
                                                 I take a few steps down the sloping alley.

It is not just the sight that is astonishing, the soundscape changes very quickly, and the odours too.

[/] I slowed my pace as I approached the large stone
pine that overlooks the orchards and the cultivated
fields that stretch into the distant horizon. I sat under
its shadow, on a rock beside its trunk.

From this vantage point, I gaze at the landscape spread
out in front of me, surprised by its vegetal geometries,
a reticulated pattern of fields shaped by the topography.
Evenly spaced, the lines of apple trees curve along
the slopes interrupted by small, dense islands
of various shades or dark green masses, the residues
of the surviving forest and the eucalyptus that has come
to replace it. Sight places us before a world that unfolds
in front of us.
                     Again, I feel a distance growing between
me and the place. The aesthetic dimension of this
landscape is the result of a human labour directed
towards agricultural productivity. These apple trees
are objects of mass production, subject to strict control
of their growth to facilitate the harvesting of the fruit.
But here they are also the predominant sentient lives
that draw this magnificent landscape. Although,
at this distance, the place expresses the instrumental
relationship humans imposed on plants, other
intertwinings will emerge from other perspectives.
How is this place perceived by the apple trees?
Or by this lonely stone pine?
                                 I direct my attention at its trunk,
and at the stone where I sit. I look at their textures
and notice their details. Sight can also be haptic.
I use my body to acknowledge my environment.
To dive again.
                                                I tasted the pine scent
but could not find the right words to describe it.
How can a smell be translated into words? Smell
is the presence of another within us. A vivid presence
that impresses the senses and changes us with each
breath. Is smell a particular form of encounter?
                                      I stayed by the pine for a while,
trying to grasp its uniqueness. Lonely, imposing,
rooted in a patch of red soil by the side of the road.
Perhaps its roots, deep inside this red earth, come
across other beings. The tree, it might not be solitary
at all. A web of many branches of varied widths
and millions of needle-shaped leaves, its immense
canopy towers over the breadth of the road and the last
apple trees on the rows that go down the slope.
It embraces my body and offers me its shade.
There are some vertical indentations on the rough husk
of its expansive trunk, fissures woven of juxtaposed
textured blades, the marks of the duration of its life.
                                     I press my hand against the bark
                           and move it, scratching my own skin.

Has it felt it? How does the tree perceive my presence?

mbing.

[/] The small path that starts at the workshop’s
back gate ends in a circular concrete terrace,
grown over by weeds, almost hidden. The seasonal
cycle seems to be inscribed on its dark surface
in the form of a composition of a variety of lighter
spots. The concrete’s discoloration is akin
to a cartography of the threshing floor’s life:
the bales of cereal that were gathered here,
the movements of the persons who threshed
and sieved them, the children’s games,
the rainwater pouring through the cracks, irrigating
the grass that now crumbles the concrete. An intense
aroma announces the presence of a line of eucalyptus
trees just ahead.
                 

  (CRACK,                                                          CRACK).
                                      CRACK,            

The rhythm of my stride breeds its own rhythm
of thinking, echoing the rhythms of the landscape
I am walking through. The bushes sway in the wind.
Flying or perched on the trees, the birds sing.
The acorns click as they fall on the pine needles
carpeting the ground

(PLOFF,
                             PLOFF,       
                                                             PLOFF).

I remember a quote by Rebecca Solnit,
from her book Wanderlust.
          “[…] the passage through a landscape
                   echoes or stimulates the passage
     through a series of thoughts.
            This creates an odd consonance
     between internal
                            and external passage,
                  one that suggests that
       the mind is also
                     a landscape of sorts
and that walking is one way
        to traverse it.”

The movement of the body — and the sensitive
details of the environment we move through
and are immersed in — sets thought in motion,
reflecting in myriad ways the facticity of the spaces,
beings and things that share the world with us.

Momentarily, the boundaries between
interior
            and exterior are blurred,
and the sway of the grass clicks my
shoulder blade and its clack

(CRACK,                                                          CRACK).
                                      CRACK,            
is also in the bird’s song.

I am no longer a foreigner in the village, I blend in with the place and with the beings that live here.

I continue towards it and reach the road.
I walk with a long stride, shifting my weight
between one leg and the other, swaying each
arm in sync with its opposite leg.
I feel my toes pressing into the asphalt,
the muscles in my calves stretching;
the shoulder blades click softly as I swing my arms

[/] I move my body in a constant rhythm,
immersed in the place’s vegetal atmosphere,
paying attention to its modulations.
When walking, we perceive ourselves
and the space in which we are immersed
through the interactions we spin as we move.
After a while, the sounds I hear begin to blur:
the birds, the rustlings of leaves,
the agricultural machine working in the distance,
the large freezer in the background, my footsteps,
they all merge and become undistinguishable.
They mix in a composition of moving flows
in which I am immersed and involved.
Suddenly, they are joined by a deep, resonant sound,
that seems to approach me from behind. Curious,
                                     I turn my body around
and see a huge beetle approaching.
                    I jump out of its way and take
cover among the branches of the large
bushes on the side of the road.
Its sound and movement stun and startle me.
Only a few seconds later, as if waking from
a dream, do I realise that it is some kind
of motorised machine driving along the road.
Composing myself,
                       I waved my arm at the driver.
I later learned that it was a vehicle
that sprays the orchards with fungicides.

I wondered the reason for its beetlelike shape.

[/]
Grafting

Grafting consists in growing the upper part of a plant, called
                                                          the scion,
on the lower part of another plant,
                                                          the rootstock.
The two plants can be from the same species or from a related
species and it is only successful when the vascular tissues

of both fuse and start to grow together. In grafted plants,
the radicular system grows from the rootstock and the aerial
part can grow only from the scion or be shared with the rootstock.
Grafting is also used as a form of plant asexual reproduction.

In Manual de Botânica, by Carlos Aguiar.

Graft                       
noun

1a: the growth or an individual resulting from the union of scion
and stock: a grafted plant (as a rosebush)
<some excellent two-year-old grafts on dwarf rootstocks>
<an expert can turn out a surprising number of grafts in a day>

b: scion

c: the point of insertion of a scion upon a stock
<the graft should be high enough to prevent the formation of scion roots>
also: the area of joining of scion and stock in grafting
<a poor graft may break after several years satisfactory growth>

2a: the act of grafting or of joining one thing to another as if by grafting
<once the nerve is exposed, a careful graft of fascia must be performed — Timothy Deer>

b: something grafted in this way; specifically: a piece of living tissue
used in grafting

Excerpt
noun
a passage (as from a book or musical composition) selected, performed, or copied : EXTRACT

Excerpt
verb
excerpted; excerpting; excerpts
transitive verb

1 to select (a passage) for quoting: EXTRACT

2 to take or publish extracts from (something, such as a book)

In Merriam-Webster

All my attention was focused on the apple
trees’ creased scars. Close to the line
where they emerge from the soil,
their thin trunks always bear the mark
of a disproportionate growth with irregular
curvilinear contours. It was as if swollen
tumours had emerged from all those
young plant bodies, some of them cracking
the tree’s skin and exposing their innards.
Astonished, I observed how the stems
kept rising above those growths with
intensity and as the trees blossomed
and bore fruit, immersed in the light.
The shapes that disturbed me were scars
of some violent event in the life of these
plants, a violence that did not interrupt
their development, but rather produced
these monstrous shapes in their multiform
bodies. Diving my attention and body into
the details of each of these beings, I noticed
fragments of a kind of rubber casing clinging
to the small monstrosities. I noticed that
some of the scars were more tenuous: small
bumps, from which, besides the dominant stem
passionately shooting towards the sky, a small
dormant branch grew. These trees, which had
apparently been less abused in the past,
produced plum-sized apples in unexpected
quantities. I thought that human bodies must
have had acted on these trees with some
purpose, leaving tuberous scars on their vegetal
bodies. The plants with smaller outgrowths
are the ones that bear the strange small fruits.
As if something had been skewed in its development.
I imagined that, on those particular plant beings,
human action had had some unexpected result.
Ignorant of the fundamentals of agricultural
techniques, I did not recognise them as the grafts
that are usually spliced into fruit trees.
However, my speculations were in tune with
the reality of their lives. Those tuberous forms
were the marks of the grafts imposed by humans
on the trees, scars from the process of joining
the vascular tissues of two beings, memories
of the rooted body’s open wound onto which
was grafted an excerpt of the fruiting plant.

As an opposition to the direct course of intention
that leads a subject to a knowledge of the exterior
world that reduces living and non-living beings
to objects to be possessed, Walter Benjamin proposed
an entering and disappearing of the subject into truth,
which can only be met through a total immersion in the
details of the world. Freeing ourselves from the notion
of truth that does not seem to contribute to a full
apprehension of the world’s form, it seems fruitful
to practice new forms of approaching the details
of the environment that surrounds, envelops and transforms
us, the environment we move through and (also) transform.
To find dispositions that favour hearing to sight,
in which our gaze becomes tactile; to create compositions
that suggest an idea of the human as a body of elements
implicated in a field of events, and not as subjects
confronted with a world of things and objects.

To walk and to stop
are modulations of the daily movement
of human bodies that stimulate the centrality
of “body space”, in other words,
the haptic experience that opens
the body to the flows of varying
intensities that make up the
world. These have been the
ways I have found to
experience immersion
in the details of the
world of events
I am a part of.

                 Plants do not run,
             plants do not fly, plants stay
         where they are. For plants, the world
       is the land where they are rooted, the wind
     that blows on them, and the sky from where
   light and rain pour down. Plants perceive
  the world with their entire bodies. They develop
 a body that privileges surface over volume. Their
leaves are the fabric of cosmic interconnectedness
that produced our atmosphere through photosynthesis,
creating the conditions for their survival, but also
for the life of an infinite variety of beings,
bodies and histories.

Plants are an example of life-as-immersion.
Plant life is life as complete exposure. Plants are
radically exposed to their environment and their
actions have fundamentally changed our planet.
One cannot separate the plant — neither physically
nor metaphysically — from the world that accommodates it.
A state of immersion is not defined by being enveloped
by an environment that penetrates us, we also penetrate
the environment.

Paraphrasing Emanuele Coccia, by making the world
possible — the same world they are part of — plants
destroy the topological hierarchy that seems to inform
our worldview. Immersion is an action of reciprocal
penetration. If penetrating the environment overlaps
being penetrated by it, the boundaries between active
and passive become blurred. Humans are not plants,
they move in space and their world is potentially
infinite in extension. However, to walk is the
intentional act closest to the non-volitional rhythms
of the body, such as breathing and heartbeat.
Walking can be a passive activity. By walking,
we find a multiplicity of spaces and places and
— in this encounter — we reposition ourselves
in the world with the same action that creates it.
                 Walking can be a way of getting closer
                                   to life-as-immersion.

By existing, plants have created a world in a planetary
scope. They eroded the boundaries between being and doing.
Knowledge and contemplation presuppose the existence
of a fixed, stable world, composed of identifiable
objects, placed before a subject, generally immobile
(so that they can have a point of view). In the world
of immersion, everything exists in movement with
varying degrees of permeability and this movement
is done with and within the subject. There is no clear
distinction between us and the rest of the world. When
acting or thinking, feeling or creating, we are dependent
and conditioned by the entire world and the concrete
situation we are in. At the same time, we are producing
this world and this situation, even if in a very small way,
even if only in the field of imagination.

                 We are experiencing living-as-immersion.

Plants made the world we live in; their existence
is at the genesis of human existence. They are life-
forms capable of altering the forms and lives of the
planet. Grafting is the joining of two plant bodies. Even
though this joining is forced by humans, the idea of mixture
is intimate to plants. Through their processes, they made matter
into life when they infested the aerial layer above the Earth’s crust
with oxygen, producing the atmosphere we know. Plants are the breath of all living beings, the world as breath. The air we breathe is not a geological ether, but a product of the life of other beings. To breathe means to be plunged into a medium that penetrates us in the same way and with the same intensity as we penetrate it. By breathing, we depend on the lives of others. We can think of grafting as a collaboration of humans to this radical joining, the world.

Grafting, and the graft, can be understood as forms of this
planetary mixture. They participate in the making of the world’s
form. As long as there are gestures that bring together bodies,
fragments or excerpts that share some affinity, new bodies
will be created, new life, new work, and a mixture emerges
through these grafting processes. A new body with the attributes
of those that have been combined, bearing the marks of that joining.

                                      Right now, I am trying to graft excerpts
                                     into textual fragments, to create a being
                                     made of words and images.[\]

[/] Lewis Carroll in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893)

and Jorge Luis Borges in On Exactitude in Science (1946)
fantasize about a map identical in size to the land
it represents. At a scale of 1:1, we might imagine
that such a map captures everything and that
every detail finds its representation on the map.
While of course a literary fiction at least for those
vast lands that such a map is said to cover, the
idea off which it plays does not seem so absurd:
that we might, indeed, one day create an archive
of knowledge – a map – able to capture
the details and complexities of the world,
if not the cosmos.

[/] Beyond what botany manuals explain,
grafting is a technique operated by humans
on the bodies of plants, which are often
seen as objects to be mass produced.
These lifeforms are reduced to what humans
call “resources”. As it is employed now,
in the context of industrial farming, grafting
becomes a technology that embodies
the relationship between humans and non-humans
within capitalism. Imagining the human species
since the advent of capitalism commits
us to the diffusion of alienation techniques that
have transformed human and non-human beings
and things into resources for capitalist exploitation.

As Anna Tsing stated, this confronts us with
the fact that modern philosophy’s notion of the human
— based on its supposedly exceptional character,
on the belief that solely the human has capacity
for self-reflexivity and self-determination,
and on the notion of its absolute independence
from its environment — remains operative, through
the assumption that attributes such as “intentionality
or “capacity for action” are unique to humans.
This conceptual framework imprisons all other beings,
conceived as dependent on humans, depriving
them of their world-making capacity. Thus,
the intertwining of life and vital spaces, the mixture
and immersion that characterize the world are hidden.

Grafting is the joining, decided and operated by humans,
of two compatible plant bodies. This joining seems
to provoke a convulsion in both beings, since
it always results in a monstrous scar. In grafting,
one acts on the bodies of others and imposes a mixture.
 In industrial farming, the combination of these beings
   is often done in a way that conditions the development
      of the plant that emerges from this mixture. Apple
        trees are grafted in such a way that they cannot grow
             into trees, their body limited to brush like growths
                  that yield more apples and are easier to harvest.

          We would have to               think carefully how
    we would draw such            a map of everything.
   That fact that the                ground that would have
        to be covered               is not flat is just the first
difficulty. Like when            we think of our own
planet, it is easy                 to forget that there are
  no perfect, flat               representations: the most
    familiar maps               use the Mercator projection, 

              Expressed in a map’s scale is the desired
   level of accuracy. No one expects that a map drawn
 to a scale of 1:25.000, for instance, will show a bump
 in the road, not even, perhaps, at  1:10 ou 1:2.
        But if we move to                  , or ‘to the things themselves’
(zu den Sachen selbst)                as Edmund Husserl formulates
the phenomenological maxim, we rightly expect every detail
  to be accounted for if it weren’t for the fact that under conditions
  of virtual infinity, the counting and accounting of all details may
                               be pointless.  

1:1

If we include time, it would only ever be possible
to create the desired representation of a specific
moment in time and only if the counting of all details
                                                      itself happens in an instant. 

                                                Such are the difficulties
                              even before we add ‘time’, which to some
                                          acts like a fourth dimension.

       which stretches        what is close to the     poles to such         a degree that the maps
     of those regions           are rendered              unusable.  This           can be dealt with by using
 other projections,        but there are always           trade-offs and                             marginalized areas.
Better would            be a three-dimensional map – a globe – but even then,                we have to be concerned
    with           its shape, for is the world really               spherical (no, it isn’t) or                                  regular (no, it isn’t)? 

This touches on the problem that real lines and surfaces
are not smooth. Depending on magnification and, hence,
proportion, a surface may appear flat or rugged. In fact,
regardless whether we think of fractal geometry as an
adequate expression for such boundaries, as Benoit
Mandelbrot argues in 
                                             How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,
       «[…] geographical curves are so involved in their detail that their
                                lengths are often infinite ormore accurately, undefinable.’ .»

     This is particularly  true if we venture from the macro
  to the micro level of reality and from there to the quantum                 level, where a measurement affects its result.

If we include time, it would only ever be possible to create the desired
        representation of a specific moment in time and only if the counting
        of all details itself happens in an instant. If I were to spend any amount
        of timeon the mapping of reality, however short it was, who is to say that the moment
        I am finished with it, what I started with would not already have changed?
        My map would then recorda temporal slippage where two points on the map show
        a visible spatial and an invisible temporal difference, the trace of the making process. 

                                              Indeed, if I need any time at all to make a map, the trajectory
                                                                 of making starts to matter leading to a virtually infinite
                                                 set of temporally displaced mappings of the same dynamic reality,
                                        which, don’t forget, will already be outdated the moment the representation                           is complete. 

In this reality in
which we live,
many ask whether
adding further patches  to    the map     will
ever lead to change. Some have investigated
new topologies, others look at the stiches, the thread
itself, even, that holds our lives together.
I have also seen people playing hopscotch on it,
                                                                           
                                                                                    inventing new rules for travel.

 The size of our ignorance cannot even be estimated,
     since those areas don’t even exist to be filled in.
        The patches only loosely connected to sets
                 floating in a sea of nothing.

References

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Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art : Deleuze and the framing of the earth. United Kingdom: Columbia University Press.

Guattari, F., Deleuze, G. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. United Kingdom: University of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599.

Krauss, R. (1979). Sculpture in the Expanded Field. October, 8, 30–44.

Llanos-Hernandez, L. (2010). The concept of territory and research in social sciences. Agricultura, sociedad y desarrollo [online]. 2010, vol.7, n.3, pp.207-220.

Schwab, M. (2019) Expositionality. In de Assis, P. and d’Errico, L. (Eds.), Artistic Research: Charting a Field in Expansion (pp. 27-45). United Kingdom: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Aguiar, Carlos. 2018. Manual de Botânica. I. Estrutura e Reprodução. Bragança:
IPB-Instituto Politécnico de Bragança e CIMO-Centro de Investigação de Montanha.

Benjamin, Walter. 2004 [1928]. Prólogo Epistemológico-Crítico a Origem do Drama Trágico Alemão, traduzido por João Barrento. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim: pp. 13-45.

Coccia, Emanuele. 2019. A Vida das Plantas: Uma Metafísica da Mistura, traduzido por Jorge Leandro Rosa. Lisboa: Sistema Solar (chancela Documenta).

Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wonderlust, A History of Walking. Nova Iorque: Penguin Books

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt .2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilitiy of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Artaud, A. (2019). As Novas revelações do Ser & O Teatro de Séraphine. Lisboa:
Edição Sr Teste

Barthes, R. (2012). How to Live Together. Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. NY: Columbia University Press

Bataille, G. (2015). O Nascimento da Arte (1ª ed.). Lisboa: Sistema Solar

Beuys, J. (1972) We won’t do it without the rose, Because We Can No Longer Think 
Baudelaire, C. (2009). Pintor da Vida Moderna (5ª ed.). Lisboa: Vega, Passagens

Correia, N. (2017). Não Percas a Rosa / Ó Liberdade, Brancura do Relâmpago.
Lisboa: Ponto de Fuga

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Still, in the map it can so happen that different times
become contemporaries. Depending how I proceeded
in drawing it, two regions could be seconds, years
or millennia apart. As my eyes move                                                                                             

                                                                                           from the one to the other region, I might move from the Middle Ages
                                                                                           to the twentieth century in a blink. And yet, the time of the map is                                                                                                           never my time, since in the map, the work of knowledge is always                                                                                                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                                                                                           already done.

There are also areas unaccounted           for                 – as well as times, for that matter –
    that no    one has cared to investigate. 

     While Carroll       and Borges share the image
       of a                 scale map, their description
     of the                     map’s fate is      distinctively
   different. In Carroll’s text, that map
               ‘has never been spread out [since] the farmers
                     objected: they said it would cover the
                         whole country, and shut out the sunlight!’ 

          The only way to imagine knowledge today is to accept that        representation
   has       shattered into an ever-increasing amount of detailed but limited views.          This map does
    not cover a territory. It consists of sets of partially overlapping, differently sized patches
           that    mark points and times of interest. Areas of knowledge accumulate around
             fashionable phenomena, past or present.

1:1

       In some sense, this map never became real, touching
  the ground only as a monument to itself, the idea of its creators.
In Borges’s version, however, the map was rolled out, thus
interfering with life. Discovering the map’s uselessness only when
it was too late, it was         
                                                ‘delivered […] up to the Inclemencies 
                                                                                       of Sun and Winters’
             
            broken     apart by them. 

The multiplication of the 

map 

map 

map

                     The difference here between Carroll’s
             and Borges’s accounts may be explained
                  by the former’s mathematical inclination
              and the latter’s work as a librarian or by the        different
                    historical periods in which those texts       were written:
             separated by fifty-odd years, they bridge       the two world wars
               and the dawning of the atomic age.          Whatever
                  the reason for the different image       of the map
                 in those texts is, in Carroll, the        map may
                                                                            be folded, 

map 

‘In the Deserts of the West,’ Borges continues
                                            ‘still today, there     are Tattered Ruins of that
                                   Map, inhabited                     by Animals and Beggars;
                                  in all the Land            there is no other Relic
                     of the Disciplines      of              Geography.’
Some may even walk onto or     off these pieces
      without     even  realizing it.

map

map 

map 

map 

mapa 

as it approaches its perfect scale goes hand
in hand with its fragmentation.
Lacking an idea, purpose or perhaps merely
the capacity of holding knowledge together
in the way a single map can seems too difficult
on all accounts. 

map

map 

map

but it remains intact, while in Borges, the map has lost its integrity.

              Still, in Borges’s map, however disintegrated
      it may be, animals and people are still dwelling,
    seemingly incapable of leaving it behind.      

                                                                     Having dared to open the map, this is the future.