Recently, it has been published Isolario Geographical notes on the work of Barbara De Ponti dedicated to providing a rereading of the work and research of this Milanese artist. Curated by Alessandro Castiglioni, the book contains critical contributions by Matilde Marzotto Caotorta, Ermanno Cristini and Elio Franzini and is published by Postmediabooks. After the presentation at the Milan Triennale, in the conference there are geographies. Artistic practice and geographical research, I met Barbara De Ponti and Alessandro Castiglioni to talk about connections between geography, architecture and art in public space.

In 2011 you started working together with Isolario. A project that is not just a book, an artist’s book or a simple collection of essays. I like to describe it taking up the words of Alessandro, as a “collection of geographical notes” on your artistic practice, Barbara. I would like to start by asking you what were the coordinates from which this work originated and to what needs it responds. But above all, why this title?
This book is on the whole a project of re-reading and analyzing Barbara’s work. It was born as a long dialogue, which still continues today, between the two of us, to which several voices have been added (Matilde Marzotto, Elio Franzini, Ermanno Cristini), as the volume documents. The idea, in the end, was clear: to enhance the procedural component, the research dimension, the investigative position, within the artist’s work, whose main field of study is that of the relationship between man and space. This relationship is studied through the visual and cultural tools of anthropic geography, cultural anthropology, architecture and urban planning. These fields were the common and shared territory in which our dialogue took place and, precisely for this reason, the topics of the book itself or, at least, the keys of reading through which I tried to reconsider the work of Barbara. The book, following this direction, has as its title the word Isolario because it identifies the first sixteenth-century publications that prelude the creation of geographical atlases. They were characterized by a description of the spaces that retained a strong identity of the places, in line with what this work documents, which is not just an atlas, but a collection of geographical notes on the work of Barbara.

A particularity of Isolario concerns its structure, apparently very rigid. To the descriptions on the practice of Barbara at the hands of Alessandro, the reflections of Ermanno Cristini and Elio Franzini alternate and the “glossary” section edited by Matilde Marzotto Caotorta. In particular, in these theoretical focus the author analyzes some key terms related to the work of the artist providing a transversal reading. I find this structure seemingly rigid, because it is a crossroads of trajectories, reflections that combine art with philosophy, literature, history, geography and architecture. I would like to know why you chose to involve these authors, also in relation to your personal projects and why you, Barbara, never take the word directly inside the book.
The book, like the process of my work, has a rigorous and multifaceted structure that proposes a multi-level reading of the theoretical path. For Isolario, which I consider an artistic operation, each author has been invited to try his own language knowing that the contribution would have been a principle for changes in perspective and for in-depth studies both for the other authors and for the readers. To remain consistent with this method, it seemed to me inappropriate to intervene with one of my texts, preferring to document the sources and solicitations from which the process of each of the works considered in the book with Alessandro begins.

Barbara, you bring your artistic work back to the definition of a place used by geography: that is, “a measure united to experience”. In your works you always start from the study of documents and archive images, meticulous and in-depth research that goes on for a long time and allow you to collect data and achieve objective and scientific results. This rational and solitary approach, however, combines experiences with people. I can think of, for example, the work Speaking Things carried out in Delft, in the Netherlands, in 2009. An installative and layering work of practices where, however, the relationship mechanism was the fundamental step. This work reminded me of Nicolas Bourriaud’s theories about relational art and two things I would like to know. How have you activated the relationship processes with the people involved in the project? If you had to define yourself as an artist, would there be a category within which you feel you belong?
The example that you mention, Speaking Thinks, is the project selected for the residence organized by id11 in Delft, based on the relationship between artists and inhabitants of the Dutch city. I was assigned an apartment in a popular building waiting to be shot down for urban redevelopment. Each apartment occupied by an artist was marked by a yellow tinted window. Art is part of the social reality and the inhabitants feel invited to deepen the knowledge of the host and of the project in progress. It was not difficult therefore to involve the population. I asked to bring, to be photographed, the object that represented their relationship with the city. Each image, with the ribbon that describes the choice, was hung on the map drawn on the ceiling, at the address of the owner. The progress of work, the thickening of the network, was the best solicitation for participation.
Each path based on relational dynamics necessarily refers to the thoughts on the practices of some artists of the 90s by Nicolas Bourriaud, and I’m glad it’s no exception mine, but I can not recognize myself in a definition preferring to use, in the same research, different dynamics, autonomous but complementary, as more scientific methods that make use of the same thesis.

The tool of the map is central both in the practice of Barbara and in the theoretical reflections of Isolario. In the “glossary” section, Caotorta reports two significant contributions: from the geographer Franco Farinelli and the writer Italo Calvino. On the one hand Farinelli, alluding to the first table designed by Anaximandro in the sixth century BC, speaks of the map as a representation of a space. On the other hand, Calvino puts the accent on the journey by writing that “the first need to fix places on paper is linked to travel”. In these two definitions the shapes of the drawing and the journey come together and summarize your practice of approaching the places. Can you tell me about the use of the map within your work, hinting also on different projects developed over the years?
Once again I have to start from the terms measure and experience. These are the two natures of the map, as well as the Isolario glossary exemplifies, which by condensing becomes the process of all my research.
I need some examples. Planning Constellation. I have selected from the answers of 300 interviewed thirteen architectures built after World War II in Milan. They became the subjects of thirteen cards that set up gave birth to an emotional map designed by those who live in the city. It is a meticulous data collection and as important as the relational part. The two natures are also present in the evolution of the project. For the creation of the book with Alessandro we decided to undertake the trips that would lead us to the destinations indicated by the interviews for a substantial knowledge of the places revealed only through this experience.