Ghitti. Maps/Mapping

Franca Ghitti, one of the most intense exponents of contemporary Italian sculpture, becomes intrigued by the Mappa di Bedolina, a famous Valcamonica rock painting, in the Sixties. The title of an article by Italo Calvino on some map-making articles exhibited at Centre Pompidou in Paris complete the work. It is indeed then that Ghitti begins to produce her first maps. "The map circumscribes a space (...) describing the course of the terrain by ciphers-signs and symbols, relating the natural landscape and its modifications: houses, and borderlines (...) my maps contain the act of delimiting, measuring, and are, in this sense, accurate and realistic" declares the artist who, in order to create these imaginary and poetic topographies, regular stories closely linked to her roots, carves, hollows out, nails different pieces of wood together, juxtaposing iron, sand and scrap from carpenter's workshops, copying the prehistoric model of the Valcamonica rock paintings.