Mapping Maps – Galbino Castle, Anghiari, Italy

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Fabrizio Ruggiero reinterprets historic cabrei—estate maps of landholdings once used by Tuscan aristocrats—as aesthetic ready-mades.

Through enlargement, erasure, and recontextualization, he transforms instruments of land measurement into poetic visual artifacts. In Duchampian terms, they emerge as “rectified imitated ready-mades”—objects stripped of function and reborn as vessels of poetic speculation.

The anonymous land-surveyor, the invisible hand who once etched vineyards, olive groves, irrigation lines, and boundary walls with remarkable precision, is honored here as an unwitting artist.

The Castle—long symbol of authority and repression in Kafka’s imagination—is recast here not as a source of alienation, but as a site of renewed identity and aesthetic reconciliation.