From 6 October to 11 November 2012 GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo is hosting C@rte del Mondo. Spazialità e Mondializzazione.
The exhibition is being staged by GAMeC, the University of Bergamo through the CST-Laboratorio Cartografico Diathesis and the Associazione BergamoScienza for the 10th BergamoScienza festival, one of the most important international science events, held this year from 5 to 21 October.

The exhibition focuses on two of the key themes this year: spatiality and globalization.
The rooms at GAMeC are hosting numerous works of art examining the themes of space, measurement and geography alongside valuable cartographic documents that testify to the development of geography and the interpretation of the rapport between space and society in different historical periods.
This is a complex exhibition path that, without delving into the history of cartography, offers visitors insight into the evolution of the concept of spatiality and its multiple forms of representation, up to its current topological reformulations.

On show are maps of enormous documental value alongside the works of Giacomo Gastaldi, Giovan Battista Caniana, Carlo Bartolomeo Grismondi and Francesco Morandi from conservation institutions in Veneto and Lombardy; masterpieces from the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (artists include Vincenzo Foppa, Bernardo Canal and Johann Georg Sanz) and important works by contemporary artists such as Alighiero Boetti, Emilio Isgrò, Alberto Garutti, Giulio Paolini, Anish Kapoor, Flavio Favelli, Robert Gligorov, Giuseppe Stampone and Patrice Cujo, to name only a few.

The documents and works on display cover a vast historical period, from the Renaissance to the present day, in order to help us understand the world in which we live, the postmodern age. In his book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the American philosopher Frederic Jameson discussed the need to find a cultural form based on the aesthetics of cognitive mapping, stating: “The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.”
Indeed, one of the most intriguing challenges of the contemporary age is that of representing the globalized world. Globalization, which uproots the componentiality of the world determined by borders, strictly modern elements, demands a new reproduction anchored in networking. The latter, determined by the connections and relationships fuelled by metropolitan hubs, makes the world a unitary system and, at the same time, a plural one, which is represented through new conceptual elaborations.

The challenge lies in successfully representing societal spatiality, i.e., a world no longer composed only of lands, seas, continents and states – physical and phenomenal elements – but, rather, by human beings and the communities that transform these elements into an inhabited space. This challenge was recently taken up by several contemporary artists who have created images evoking the movement and connectivity of today’s world and of space in its various facets, but also by geographers, who have tested new mapping approaches that recover the third dimension, Earth’s sphericity and anamorphosis, in order to exalt the presence of the individual.