Marco

DRAWING CITIES

Drawing in the city is a form of exploration that reveals how movement through space is far more than a simple act of getting from one point to another. In the line traced on the page, pencil and moving body, the space traversed and the gaze that crosses it come together in a single intertwining. Too often, the drawing of the city is delegated to a technical domain, as if urban design were merely a set of volumes and orthogonal lines that establish flows and organize, or exclude, bodies. There is another way of thinking about urban drawing, one that draws on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s idea of the line as movement, where body and thought, action and imagination meet.

The idea of graphic geography takes up this challenge, adopting comics, live sketching, and illustration as methodologies for urban research. If walking is already a way of paying attention, drawing cities is a transformative act. Drawing while walking makes it possible to translate the trajectories of moving bodies into stories that leave traces of our passage on the page. Drawing is an immersive experience, a narrative of the city, a transformative action, both an urban portrait and a project.

DANCE MOVES

Illustrations by Tânia A. Cardoso
Texts by Giada Peterle and Tânia A. Cardoso

The graphic story Dance Moves emerges from a dialogue between architecture, geography, and graphic languages. It is the result of a walking-based workshop held in April 2025, involving students of the Master’s Degree Programme in Landscape Sciences and members of the public. The walkshop promoted a collaborative approach to the production of stories in motion. The structure of the panels visually embodies this idea by dividing the reading into three narrative lines. The first retraces the actions carried out while walking through the city, such as drawing, exploring, and conversing. The second focuses on the illustrator’s experience and point of view. The third incorporates fragments of the participants’ stories, integrating multiple perspectives into a narrative that is both intimate and plural.

IN FOCUS

Urban Mappings

What should a city map represent? Which bodies, desires, voices, and dreams have the right to inhabit it? Cartography is not a technical language reserved for a few, but a dynamic tool accessible to every inhabitant. Walking in the city is a method for collecting narrative prompts and building creative cartographies through field research and urban sketching sessions. Alongside drawings of streets and buildings, Cardoso’s maps incorporate comics and illustrations, enlivened by colours and sounds. They suggest actions to liberate the gaze. By welcoming sounds, smells, and voices, the map is no longer a static plan projecting an orthogonal vision of space, but a living, dynamic place to be inhabited by walking. In this selection, original maps propose itineraries, exercises, and inspirations for drawing while walking in the cities of Padua, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam.

Creative Process

The sketchbook is a meeting place where drawing, gaze, and city intertwine, finding a shared graphic language. Here the first steps are taken so that notes made while walking and observing can later become a story; here fragments of the narrative are collected and then recomposed into intricate paths.
Cardoso’s sketchbooks, exhibited together with her publications, make it possible to trace this process of reworking, from the spontaneous capture of fleeting marks drawn during field research to the complex forms those initial notes take once translated into book form. Following the lines on these pages means entering the creative process: recognizing returns, detours, obstacles, and erasures, leading to the construction of a narrative thread.
An opportunity to observe how thought, from urban sketching to the printed page, can move away from the actual route to open up new paths.

Notes

Created by participants in the walking graphic workshop held in April 2025, the accordion-fold sketchbooks inspired the polyphony of the Dance Moves narrative. Each one focuses on observing a material or immaterial aspect of the urban landscape, while also telling the aspirations and fears of those who traverse it. Between the folds, animalscapes, dirtscapes, technoscapes, dreamscapes, globalscapes, and other landscapes take shape.
These sketchbooks reveal the plural stratifications of walking landscapes and invite the weaving together of collective walking with the sharing of intimate and personal stories.

Among the authors:
Gaia Ballatori, Elena Barbiero, Erika Basso, Francesco Casari, Aurora Circelli, Isabela De Jesus Cadorin, Juliet Fall, Perla Franco, Filippo Milani, Giulia Molinarolo, Ginevra Montefusco, Sabrina Neri, Elisa Sella, Giorgia Vulcan, Israt Zahan Bhuiyan, Francesco Zuccolo.

Geography Museum – Exhibition

Via del Santo, 26

Duration: January 18–February 15

Tuesday from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Sunday from 2:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.