“The Map is Not the Territory”* is an exercise in reading the artwork as a field of relational and traversable forces, aimed at questioning the power dynamics embedded in the representation and definition of space.

Developed through a shared reflection with YEPP è Fica, the Gruppo Donnə of Arcigay Torino, and Dirty Talks, the project investigates urban “glitches” as spaces of care, resistance, and possibility. These glitches—cracks in the dominant narratives of the city—become portals through which alternative forms of living, desiring, and inhabiting can emerge.

The work engages in dialogue with the exhibition space, activating reflections on mediation, imagination, and the role of art as a situated, affective, and transformative practice. It challenges conventional modes of spatial representation and invites the viewer to reconsider how maps, often seen as neutral tools, can instead function as instruments of control or emancipation.

     “The Map is Not the Territory” presents fragments of spatial narratives in the form of postcards made available to the audience. These postcards act as traces—intimate, poetic, and political—that evoke lived experiences and minor geographies, encouraging a re-mapping of the everyday through gestures of care and collective memory.

* The phrase “The map is not the territory” is attributed to the philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski, who coined it in 1931 to highlight the gap between representation and reality. The concept has been taken up in various contexts: by Lewis Carroll, who imagined a map as large as the territory itself, and by Jorge Luis Borges, who explored its absurdity in the story On Exactitude in Science. Adopted in critical theory and media studies by authors such as Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan, it becomes a lens through which to reflect on the limits of official narratives, the distortions of power in the construction of space, and the necessity of imagining new affective and situated cartographies.