mapeario Critical mapping, agency, and landscape stewardship Original work by:
f l av i o s c i a r a f f i a Flavio is a landscape architect, designer and self-taught cartographer who articulates scientific data and design to create narratives about nature, ecology and landscapes. Mapeario is a platform for showcasing his work in the realm of critical cartography. Beyond this, Flavio is engaged in developing plans, strategies, research, and policy around issues of landscape sustainability, ecological planning, and conservation. A sample of this work can be found here.
Torres del Paine National Park Forest fire 2011 – 2012
Series “Anthropocene” | N°1 The “Anthropocene” series aims to reveal that landscapes, including protected areas, are not pristine territories. For thousands of years, these territories have been subject to change, whether due to human, natural processes, or a combination of both. ~ Considering a minimal time window on the geological scale, this project indexes the forest fires that have occurred in Torres del Paine National Park since 1980 and analyzes the footprint of the most devastating fire in the park’s contemporary ecological history.
Central Glaciers O’Higgins Region
Series “Mirrors” | N°3 This series seeks to unveil two dimensions of a single geographical space—the flat and the elevated—creating an expanded field that interweaves the three-dimensional nature of the territory with the essential planar reduction required for representing vast areas. This series employs oversized formats and unconventional colors, departing from the conventions of traditional cartography to accentuate the landscape’s morphology. ~ The O’Higgins Region is home to the second-largest expanse of ice fields after the vast southern and northern Patagonian ice fields. Invisible to most, these glaciers reside within a Mediterranean ecosystem characterized by a lengthy dry season and elevated temperatures for much of the year. This map aims to reevaluate the value of these imperceptible natural features, yet critical for the survival of millions of people in the Chilean central valley. By critically unveiling them, the map intends to evoke the emotions associated with the sublime that would emerge if observed in real life.
High Andes Slopes, runoff, accumulation
Series “Flows” | N°1 This series aims to construct a speculative mapping of the diverse energy and material flows in the landscape ~ The first map in the series focuses on hydrological flows and their driving factors in the High Andean Plateau zone in northern Chile. Concepts such as water, runoff, and accumulation are spatially represented in the composition. The aesthetic experience of the map emerges from the geographic topology inherent to these elements and the graphic expression of their combination in various planes.
Fluxus gene Spatial range and motion datums of a puma concolor
Series “Flows” | N°2 ~ The second installment in the series delves into the energy dynamics of the local biota, focusing on a prominent species within the Chilean landscape: the puma concolor. Puma populations exhibit a wide-ranging and diverse territorial presence, encompassing mountainous regions, valleys, and even inhabited areas. They navigate a landscape fraught with challenges, overcoming spatial barriers such as fences and road crossings. This critical cartography piece unveils the puma’s extensive spatiotemporal range of movement, covering over 2500 square kilometers and spanning more than 1200 kilometers in just over six months. The composition indexes a wealth of information in various formats. It provides insights into daily distances traveled, cumulative distances, elevation gains, and time adjusted to the extent of daily movements. Additionally, key landmarks such as the start and end of the journey and the places and moments when the animal had to confront road crossings were identified. This work speaks to a shared, albeit invisible, space where human populations inadvertently coexist with a dynamic and ever-present nature.
Fluxus gene Spatial range and motion datums of a puma concolor
Four Borders International boundary, maritime territory, elevations, and depths Series “Limits” | N°1 This series questions the traditional representation of boundaries as flat, dimensionless lines, suggesting that maps are not neutral objects but rather instruments with intentional cultural and political significance. ~ In this composition, the two official boundaries of Chile—the international boundary and maritime territory—are represented as elevations and depths, respectively. This approach highlights the spatiality of political artifacts and conventions, and, as a result, the potential implications for their interpretation.
Parque Nacional Conguillío Conguillío II National Park Araucanía Región deRegion la Araucanía
Series “Parks” | N°3 ~ The Parks series centers on the territories encompassed by the national system of protected areas. It challenges the initial paradigm of mid-20thcentury ecological conservation, which advocated for the establishment of rigid boundaries between human activities— that degrade the environment–and pristine nature. These binary boundaries have shaped the current concept of protected areas, portraying them as isolated spaces within an empty context, while overlooking edge ecological processes that transcend jurisdictional scales and limits. This paradigm has proven ineffective for conservation because it obscures feedback loops and cause-and-effect relationships, creating the illusion that the adoption of sustainable behaviors outside the park’s boundaries is unnecessary. ~ The map amplifies the binary condition to highlight the notion that the separation between the human and the natural is an artificial construct.
Chilean Antarctic territory Sea ice extension 1981 – 2010 Series “Projections” | N°5 This series reprojects historical cartographic pieces using contemporary geographic datums. In some cases, the result allows to visualize changes driven by natural processes, while in others, it highlights differences in how the territory was interpreted between separate cartographic processes over time and through various techniques. In all instances, this series revitalizes the historical records and chronicles of territorial exploration. ~ In this historical nautical chart from the Chilean Navy, a high-resolution and updated digital topography of Antarctica has been overlaid with a color gradient, highlighting the topographic diversity of the unknown Antarctic continent. Additionally, historical data records of sea ice extent from February to September have been included, capturing the ecological pulse of ice mass growth and reduction. Each line within the chart represents the median value of ice extent for each month spanning from 1981 to 2010. This composition offers a comprehensive depiction of Antarctica’s topographical features and the dynamic changes in its sea ice cover over time.
Highland archipelago Metropolitan Region
Series “Islands” | N°3 The series captures the high-altitude landscape of the Central Andres Range, often overlooked and out of reach by valley dwellers. These towering peaks, emerging above the clouds, form a theoretical archipelago. ~ The third map in the series focuses on the Andes Range section east of the city of Santiago. Topography is represented using a color ramp blurring morphological features below 4000 meters. The island chain that emerges intriguingly serves as border markers between Chile and Argentina.