The (Aesth)Ethics of Publishing Geopolitical Maps

This chapter stems from a decade of ethnographic encounters between the editors of the Handbook of Cartographic Humanities and Laura Canali, designer of geopolitical maps for the popular magazine Limes: Italian Review of Geopolitics and map artist based in Rome. Drawing from a selection of excerpts from those recurring encounters, this conversation unfolds and reflects upon the complexities of the craft of making geopolitical/poetical cartography for different publics, from that of the magazine’s readers to the map/art exhibition’s audience. The idiosyncratic experience of this mapmaker shows how ethnography is a crucial way to investigate the public dimension of cartographic authorship as it is felt by the mapmaker, as well as the decisions, ethical interrogations and precariousness it always implies, particularly in the case of geopolitical maps.