« Les temps se mêlent, voilés par la Légende, et l'on situe l'Elam à mi-chemin du Songe et de la Barbarie. »
Sophie Khan, Odyssée, Suite et Fin.

« The Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, 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. »
Jorge Luis Borgès, On Exactitude in Science, A Universal History of Infamy.



If a map — an ensemble of images and signs, where images may have the value of signs, and signs sometimes become images — can be considered a conceptual landscape, an archaeological plan superimposes the pictographic representation of a contemporary geography upon that of a historical place, now vanished. Not only is its scale reduced — that is the very appeal and magic of a map — but it also proposes, or rather “shows,” only ruined and fragmentary structures, remnants of what they once were. Thus, the mental reconstruction required of the reader, or viewer, is twofold.

At times, the plan will attempt to complete, in dotted lines or with a lighter stroke, the missing parts of a building; a fallen wall and a few broken columns are enough to restore the image of a space that was once conceived and inhabited. Palaces, which we may suppose were imposing, and trading cities, no doubt stifling beneath the heat, where people once came to taste the coolness of fountains, have been reduced to a few lost traces on an empty, desolate surface, or, conversely, blurred by more recent interventions.

Somewhere between ancient ramparts, collapsed towers, and landmarks in Chinese ink; forgotten empires and desert of dust; supposed photographic reality and pictographic tracings; legends and insets; the Tigris and Euphrates; hatching and italics, a map of our dreams takes shape.


Translated by AI.