An atlas is a book, the place where all the signs of the earth, from the natural to the cultural ones, are conventionally represented: mountains, lakes, pyramids, oceans, cities, villages, stars, islands. In this totality of symbols and descriptions, we locate the place where we live, and where we would like to go, the route to follow. I think that traveling on a map, something that writers are particularly fond of, is one of our most natural mental gestures, right from childhood. The inevitable association of ideas and the overlapping of images, automatically take care of the rest.

In this work, I wanted to make a journey to the place that, actually eliminates the journey itself, precisely because all the possible journey have already been described and the itineraries have already been traced. By now all the paradise islands dear to literature and to our hopes have already been described, and the only possible discovery or journey seems to be that of discovering the discovery

already made. Thus, analogously, the only possible journey now seems to be within the sphere of signs and images; that is, in the destruction of the direct experience. If “ Ocean” immediately elicits the infinite possibile images we have in our minds, as the writing gradually disappears, so, too, do the meridians, and parallels and numbers. The landscape become natural, no longer evoked but expressed there before us, as if some mysterious hand has substituted the book with a real landscape, right before our eyes. In this case, it is photography with its potential to always vary the relationships with what is real, that shifts the term of the problem by evoking an ‘illusory’ naturalness. (…) Luigi Ghirri