Ways of Living/Leaving: Intermedial Landscape, Walking and Mapping

We are interested in contributions that approach the notions of landscape, maps and walking as they appear and intertwine in contemporary literary, artistic and other disciplinary practices. The idea is to pay attention to intermedial manifestations of these concepts, particularly those that locate literature in relation to other media and technologies, and also to how gender, authorship, reception and the consolidation/subversion of canon determine the way we relate to the planet.    Approaching landscapes, maps and walking as intermedial ways of representing, interpreting and living in the world is a broad and evocative area of comparatist reflection that might help to promote links among the subject and its environment, allowing to reinterpret and distinguish new boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the individual and the collective, the personal and the political.

We encourage readings of works such as the book La compañía (2019) by Mexican author Verónica Gerber Bicecci, where a map of meteor falling near a mine in Zacatecas is set in dialogue with comments of an old man who witnessed one of these incidents and with black and white photographs Gerber Bicecci took during her walk around that abandoned zone. Derived from a museum exhibit, in this book notions such as authorship, subject, map and landscape are questioned to the limit, and the intermedial comparative approach results in very productive reflections of what we are doing to the environment.

We hope this illustrates how to consider all three central notions of this proposal in one single example; however, it is not restrictive of other approaches that may include them in different ways and through different media.