Visual territories and communicative landscapes. Mapping and configuration of complex phenomena

Joel de Rosnay (1977) defines a “complex system” as an organism composed of a large variety of components that have specialized functions (Bettini, 2014). Starting from its metaphorical value, the territorial system is complex by definition, or rather a multiform organism that, besides representing a symbolic archive of shared memory, is a real and rhetorical place whose resources and assets are the result of the historical combination of environmental, human and cultural factors that have marked life and development over time (Cristallo, 2004). The reading of a territory is therefore a multiple action since it simultaneously envisages the interpretation of its characters and the construction of “meaning areas”. Understanding the territory is therefore equivalent to codifying the signs, alphabets and visual grammars that make up a stylistic and narrative figure capable of reproducing a “communicative landscape”. Landscape in the sense of “perspective and visual reconstruction”, made up of natural and anthropic characters and also those offered by a sort of long, empirical, and sometimes “poetic” look, to compose a relational vision. Resuming what was claimed by Capra, namely that “relations must be mapped” (Capra, 2015), since it is not possible to measure or weigh them, therefore quantify them (qualitative and relational approach) the paper aims to illustrate reading models and visual restitution of the “concept of territory” in physical and metaphysical terms. An exercise that starts from a didactic and research experience developed within a representative process that identifies the passage from a “communication geography” (objective surface phenomena) to a “communication mapping” (phenomena’s conceptualization and relation).