Terre che non sono la mia

Matteo Meschiari

In conversation with Chiara Gatti

For over two thousand years, geography has been used as a tool of power to describe and control territory.

This is still true today, and many believe that map-making is a skill reserved for experts and professionals. But geography has always also been an imaginative practice accessible to everyone — a range of ways to experience space that helps us understand others and dream of elsewhere.

If the West has quickly forgotten this geographical vocation for otherness, there are still thousands of traces and cultural remnants that testify to the existence of another geography — a COUNTERGEOGRAPHY that continues to generate visions and produce wonderful inventions.

In this one-of-a-kind book, Matteo Meschiari has gathered 111 maps that showcase the incredible variability and cultural creativity of our species, in a journey that spans from Greenland to Australia, from China to the Amazon, from Paleolithic art to contemporary art, from Babylon to an Italian daycare. A sample of distant worlds to understand and discuss our own, an atlas of “territà” to rethink our place on this planet.

Bio:

Writer and anthropologist, Matteo Meschiari teaches Cultural Geography at the University of Palermo. His research interests include landscape in literature, housing models from the Paleolithic to the Anthropocene, prehistoric and tribal art, and the perceived and lived space in both the West and Indigenous cultures. A representative of narrative anthropology, he has written and edited essays, novels, poetry, and children’s books. Among his most recent works: Artico nero. La lunga notte dei popoli dei ghiacci (2016), Neogeografia. Per un nuovo immaginario terrestre (2019), Antropocene fantastico. Scrivere un altro mondo (2020), Geografie del collasso. L’Antropocene in 9 parole chiave (2021), Landness. Una storia geoanarchica (2022), Kosmos (2023), and La fabbrica dei mondi. Geografie immaginate e Territà (2024).