On stage, the voice and presence of Isabella Bordoni – also author of the lyrical text that is the main theme of the show – and Alessandro Culiani on cello. The performers sit around a table that changes during the performance and which acts as a support, projection painting, hut-canopy. The evocation is that of a classic seventeenth-century representation where the elements of profession and travel, instruments of orientation and measurement, letters, appear. The music moves between modernity and archaicism: the voices alone alternate with the choirs, and the live cello plays with the sound and performance practice of the viola da gamba. Matvejevic’s voice off designs the acoustical space of the work.

The theatre, in its broadest sense, stands at the meeting point between the world as it is seen and the world as it is represented. Il Cartografo is a reflection on cartography and the representation of the world, where different methodologies, histories, and places are brought back to life through digital technologies.

Il Cartografo is a vibrant core of images, sounds, and stories collected and re-presented in the original languages of the northern Adriatic. Voices of friends and strangers, recorded during journeys across the coastal regions and inland territories, come together to form a human and sonic geography. An “audio-visual” mission to gather fragments from the kaleidoscope of languages and dialects spoken in small towns as well as historically significant cities such as Venice and Trieste. Through these voices, a map emerges, creating an acoustic forest that serves as the platform and soundscape for the performance.

Interwoven with these voices is the off-screen narration of Predrag Matvejević, reading selected passages from his work Mediterranean. Deeply encyclopaedic and archival in nature, the book weaves a mythical texture from fragments and details—from the small, everyday things of life, such as the names of objects, tools, and implements. It is in this same spirit that the collection of voices was assembled.

Performed live is the voice and presence of Isabella Bordoni, who also wrote the lyrical text that serves as the thread running through the performance. It is a text of journeys, crossings, and passage.

On stage, a table is the central element around which the performers are seated, evoking a seventeenth-century tableau in which all the attributes of the cartographer’s profession and the act of travel are displayed. Throughout the performance, the table transforms continuously: it serves as a support, a projection surface, a tent, a shelter, and a place of refuge.

The entire action unfolds around this single space—a place that evokes maps while becoming a map itself. It observes and is observed at the same time: “Horon horonta”—“seeing him in the act of seeing me” (Dionysus).

The technological core of the performance lies in the use of digital media, which allows both the real-time manipulation of projected video images and the live control of sounds and voices that move continuously around the audience through a computer-operated multichannel sound system.

The musical language moves between the archaic and the contemporary. Solo voices and choral textures travel through space, while the live cello engages in dialogue with the sound world and performance practice of the viola da gamba. The sound design is conceived to create space and time for the enumerative word, for the stories that are evoked.

The use of video technology engages in a dialogue with the seventeenth-century technology of the camera obscura. As one cartographer of the period wrote in his diary: “I shall bring delightful news into your home; just as, in a dark chamber, the action of the sun passing through a pane of glass reveals everything that happens outside (though inverted).” Elsewhere he writes: “In my house I have Drebbel’s other instrument, which produces marvellous effects of reflected images in a dark chamber. I cannot describe its beauty in words: every painting is lifeless by comparison, for here it is life itself—or something even more alive—if only words did not fail me. Figure, outline, and movement merge there with complete naturalness, in a most delightful way.”

In Il Cartografo , the camera obscura is thus re-created through digital technologies, building a bridge between the seventeenth century and the present day.

The term descriptio was one of the words most commonly used to describe the practice of cartography: cartographers and their publishers were, in fact, known as “describers of the world.”

Everything becomes an adventure into the world of perception, of the infinitely small and the infinitely vast. Optics transform the act of seeing, while acoustics become dynamic through the movement of sound in space. Yet the table also bears another object that appears frequently in seventeenth-century painting: letters.
In the paintings of that period, the letter often occupies the centre of attention, yet its contents remain hidden. We cannot read it, nor can we infer its meaning from the gestures of the figures. However carefully we look, the message remains inaccessible, confined to the private realm of its author or recipient.
In the performance, it is precisely the gradual revelation of the contents of a series of imaginary letters that draws us inside the “painting,” inviting us—now transformed into cartographers of space and time—to explore places that would otherwise remain beyond our reach.

… un complesso apparato acustico fa apparire in vari angoli della sala voci anonime che descrivono luoghi quotidiani. Fra queste evocazioni appare anche la voce di un moderno studioso di popoli e territori, Predrag Matvejevic’, che traccia attraverso brani del suo libro Mediterraneo altre geografie, definite attraverso oggetti, parole, nomi, consuetudini e riallacciandosi all’idea di un territorio fuori dalla stretta limitazione di un confine politico, quindi negando e affermando contemporaneamente l’idea di un possibile disegno definitivo del mondo …
Antonio Audino, Il Sole 24 Ore
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… per arrivare a una riflessione fatta di suoni, voci e immagini, sulla rappresentazione, cartografica, e sulla percezione del mondo. Partendo dall’Alto Adriatico, di cui risuonavano in un’elaboratissima “drammaturgia dal vivo” … il Cartografo proponeva una serie di stimoli multimediali assai fascinosi …
Mario Brandolin, Il Messaggero Veneto

… della ottima compagnia di Rimini Giardini Pensili … la prima tappa della “drammaturgia di viaggio” … una riflessione sulla cartografia e sulla rappresentazione del mondo, un lavoro enciclopedico situato al punto di incontro tra mondo visto e mondo raffigurato …
L’Unità

… in un output di percezioni sospese volontariamente al limite della significatività per dare al tema mediterraneo l’iridescenza e la leggerezza delle proposte di Giardini Pensili: un vero “teatro d’ascolto”
Roberto Canziani, Il Piccolo

… E si sofferma, in Il Cartografo, nella precisione maniacale di una metafisica partita a scacchi, in una rappresentazione del mondo, che mescola il grande e il piccolo. Una geografia della memoria intessuta di voci note, di compagni di strada, di teatranti, mesclate a quelle del quotidiano. Un esempio di come la microstoria si possa mescolare alla Storia con la maiuscola. Un racconto dell’Adriatico … a fare da guida la voce dello stesso Matvejevic’…
Maria Grazia Gregori, L’Unità

… sottolinea con le vibrazioni del suo violoncello le malie ipnotiche delle parole…
Elena Pousché, Il Gazzettino del Friuli Venezia Giulia

…Il Cartografo è di Roberto Paci Dalò e si avvale dei testi di Matvejevic’ e di Isabella Bordoni, che è anche la brava inteprete, oltre che di un affascinante apparato di immagini e voci registrate…
Luca Doninelli, L’Avvenire