literature

Cerulean edged watercourses, emerald-green banks skirted by lined or dotting trees. Rivers and valleys meandering loops. Cities: streets and parks, building bulwarks. Marco Campanini's pictures landscapes are inhabited by rarefied signs appearing us like mirages, being plunged in dawning lands and closed by absolute light burnt horizons.
But which landscapes – if from these elements it is certain that this is the matter – are we contemplating? View is unusual. Indeed, territories where we are brought for a bird's eye view are not real places, but maps: a planimetrical representation of them, made following a matching relationship turned to practical knowledge.
Mental travelling on map already enchanted Ludovico Ariosto, who loved to "travel on maps rather than waving on vessels"¹. Nevertheless, if made with a camera, it immediately evokes memories of Ghirri: "The sole possible journey seems by now to be within signs and images: into direct experience destruction" ². From these premises, Ghirri ventured through the pages of an Atlante with dithered colours and conventional signs, for submitting to extreme verification the last possibilities of thinking about imaginary worlds today.
Having a debt with it anyway, journey through Marco Campanini's Isolarios is so much different and one can easily realise it. In these maps, drawn out from Este archives dark and given back to a window diffused lighting, no representation is pre-established or serialized. Everything has individual shapes different from others, rich in details and imitating natural ones. No conventional signs and no legend for interpretation. Certainly this style - concretizing in drawing, characters and colours subtlety – is clearly indicative of their distance from contemporary world. But the strong hiatus, unloadable if compared to our present, is in the concept indeed: it resides in these maps belonging to an age where territory could not be represented without considering an autoptical examination, a direct experience. During Modern Age, a substitution of isolarios with atlas really took place among geographical books. In explaining this phase sense Franco Farinelli illuminatingly writes: "there is one difference between atlas and isolario: in the first one globe is turned into space, while in the second this change does not occur, and dry lands are still considered as places"³. It is the process of abstraction, of turning the world into calculable entity⁴, that nowadays is concluded and seems to be peremptorily preconized by the precision instruments standing out in the opening picture of these images series.
Hence, Campanini firstly offers a re-presenting of a previous translation: the one from territory to map tracing back to mentioned age and methods. This is just the first step of his artistic strategy. If travelling on Atlante is in fact completely played in an inward time dimension, mentally running through a place – and observing how it irremediably does not and will never appear again - produces an intersection with another time depth: the sense of history. In such a prepared ground the artist performs his intervention: a second reading, a further personal translation made through the photographic tool. Studying phase is followed by empathy, a syntony solving on imagination plan. From view selecting action originate shot and focusing. Here is Marco Campanini's definitive move, by introducing an illusionism dissolving mere reproduction idea for projecting us into an outdated dimension able to wrap and lead us to a vertigo. By explicitly inspiring to eighteen-century literary promenade picturale – short story upon a walk within a painting as occasion for philosophic digression – Campanini updates it by turning it into a metalinguistic journey where one image arises from another and thought discovers references and correspondences through passages, filters and translations.
Hence, in this sense photography is – as he stated – "like a large camera obscura oriented towards world and human thought" and assuming the same particular ability of gathering culture history invisible reflections inside objective lens system, in a potentially endless hall of real or mental mirrors. What can be superficially degraded to mere mechanical reproduction reveals as a subtle installation: a semiotic reflection transmuting in refined aesthetic experience.

Daniele De Luigi