Intermedial Editing in the Representations of Places of Origin

Among the maps of places of origin considered in this study, more than fifty contain elements of montage, i.e. drawings in which heterogeneous entities are juxtaposed, producing a semantic gap. In the majority of such drawings, the authors went beyond the mere juxtaposition of different elements to realize more radical editing operations, adapting creatively to the representation of one’s place of origin composition techniques borrowed from popular genres and media. Some drawings, for instance, include the reproduction of a series of photographs; others imitate graphic visualization techniques (e.g. zooming) or comics; others include a legend, i.e. a list of symbols with an explanation of their meanings. The techniques used in these maps, this chapter suggests, can be considered examples of intermedial editing. The chapter’s aim is to analyze these drawings focusing on the montage and imitation techniques used by their authors. The first part of the chapter investigates these compositional processes from a theoretical point of view, combining a semiotic perspective with insights from other disciplines. In particular, the reflections on the aesthetic aspects of montage (paragraph 2) are connected to enunciation theory (paragraph 3). By integrating the concepts of montage, practice of the enunciation (praxis énonciative) and bricolage, it will be possible to consider these drawings under a common descriptive frame (paragraph 4). The second part of this chapter will be devoted to the analysis of the maps, which will be ordered according to the level of complexity of their montage procedures (paragraph 5): starting from degree zero – which corresponds to an atypical use of the elements of the map – we shall then focus on the use of color and text, and finally concentrate primarily on those cases that present the imitation of different media devices, genres and visualization techniques.