Author Description

Awareness of ‘distance’, in a broad sense, and specifically of geographical remoteness, is more over a variable of the cultural context to which the perceiver belongs. Many contemporary concepts, from the theories on the relativity of time to that of the visual and experiential unity of non-places, now take this forgranted. Historiography on travel, and on land and sea circulations, does not always take this into due account, even in the field of art history. This issue of Engramma therefore wants to be an exercise in understanding different odeporic systems, voyages, spaces, imaginaries “overland sand seas”. It therefore wants to talk about voyages and dislocations of people and objects - by seas and by lands - but also about how the objective reality of this experience intersects with expectations, conventions, and modes of fruition that in some cases break down the real kilometres (or sea miles), towards an idea, exaggeratedly, of a single wide spread place, or a series of places, in a sort of global experience (pilgrimages, geographical discoveries, the Grand Tour, Universal Expositions). Sometimes, on the other hand, the object, literary or artistic, acts as an access point for a journey more performed in time than in its physical distance.