Like a Drop Glowing on a Glass

Abstract

Starting from three different figures of traveler – the tourist, the migrant and the commuter – the article outlines a fourth one, that is, someone who moves in a familiar territory as if he were a foreigner, in particular walking without a map, only orienting himself with the landscape, to reach a randomly chosen location. This estrangement device, together with the waiver to follow an established path, or to find the way thanks to a cartographic representation, are analyzed as strategies for a more conscious dwelling on the move, able to go beyond belonging and appropriation, based on a local knowledge, from below, attentive to details. A knowledge that comes from a direct relationship with the landscape, where places are intersections of trajectories, and not just portions of space. They are an overlapping of times and rhythms, of gestures and habits, of comings and goings and stories. They are subjects to be frequented and not objects to be interpreted. They are knots in different architextures that can only be unfolded by passing through them like a drop flowing on a glass.