‘Atlante’: Mapping Absence and Uncertainty in Naples

The approach to Thomas Dane Gallery in Naples is disarmingly ambiguous, a staircase that withholds any sense of what lies ahead. At the top, there is an unassuming door, a small sign, and a guestbook placed outside, as if the gallery is still deciding how visible it wants to be. Behind the door, the space opens abruptly: the gallery’s ceilings are high, each room light-filled and gorgeously airy. This is the backdrop for Atlante, an exhibition curated by James Lingwood, on view from 3 February to 5 May 2026.

Introducing the group show, Lingwood begins with a quote from the late Italian artist and photographer Luigi Ghirri. “The pleasure of looking at the map,” Ghirri writes, “is one of the most natural gestures of humans from childhood onwards.” Lingwood returns to this idea repeatedly, describing the exhibition itself as “a journey across maps and charts, imagined or reimagined by eight artists.” The emphasis is not on mapping as a system, but on what happens when that system begins to fail.

The title Atlante comes from two historical works that anchor the exhibition. One is Ghirri’s own Atlante from 1973. The other is a portfolio made three years earlier by Claudio Parmiggiani, for which Ghirri took the photographs. In translation, the title gathers a sort of poetry; in Italian, it simply means “atlas.” “In English, “atlas” becomes the Atlantic, the lost island of Atlantis, and so on,” Lingwood points out. Atlante also resonates with the Farnese Atlas, displayed nearby in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, the oldest extant sculpture of the mythological figure holding the world on his shoulders.

Ghirri’s Atlante consists of close-up photographs of pages from the atlas he kept at home. Using a macro lens, he moves progressively closer until the images lose their informational clarity. Borders, depths, and coordinates begin to detach from their function. “The idea,” the curator explains, “is to unmoor the signifiers on the pages of the atlas from being real information about borders, or depths… so they become abstractions.” At a certain point, the printing technique itself breaks down into dots. What had been a tool for orientation becomes something closer to an image without direction. Lingwood describes the exhibition as a whole in similar terms. “You start off with the coordinates of the map,” he says, “and gradually you drift away into more imaginary territories or spaces.”

Parmiggiani’s Atlante was made in late 1968, at almost exactly the moment when photographs of the Earth taken from space began circulating widely. Those images of a serene planet coincide with a period of intense social upheaval. From that point on, Lingwood observes, many artists began thinking about maps “and the complicity of maps with regimes of conquest, empire, and so on.” Parmiggiani’s distorted globes and later works such as Zoo Geografico, where the outlines of continents are placed onto the bodies of cows standing in a field, sit squarely in that dismantling of systems of classification.

From this historical base, the exhibition moves into contemporary work. Emma McNally’s large graphite drawings are introduced as charts rather than maps. “Maps are essentially about geography and topography of the land,” the curator says. “Charts attempt to talk about currents, movements, depths, and so on in the sea.” McNally, he suggests, is charting turbulence itself. Her drawings hold multiple possible readings. Weather systems, underwater soundings, cosmic movement, vibrations. All are made solely with graphite, a fact that often surprises viewers who assume they are prints.

Akram Zaatari’s works return the exhibition explicitly to the Mediterranean. Instead of borders and landmasses, the sea becomes the primary space. Zaatari uses the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet, developed for trade and navigation, scattering them across the surface. “The sea is a space of exchange,” Lingwood says, “where people, goods, and ideas could move with some relative ease, and at that time without the kind of borders that increasingly became imposed.” The orientation of the work resists immediate recognition. As Zaatari explains, the Phoenicians had no reason to orient the Mediterranean in the way modern maps do. “They just navigated it.”

Zaatari’s Mediterranean Ruins extend this thinking into a speculative register. Made through electroplating thin sheets of copper, they imagine a Mediterranean without water. The patina marks “the stain of where the water used to be,” he shares.

Anri Sala’s Maps Species pair historical engravings of sea creatures with distorted maps of nation states. Sala speaks about the cadre de référence, the frame of reference imposed by the paper itself. Animals are contorted to fit the frame, just as countries are contorted by political borders. “Maps are a fiction to start with,” the artist says. “But what sort of additional fiction do we apply?”

If the gallery’s first reveal wasn’t impact enough, my next turn leads me onto the sprawling veranda, overlooking the Gulf of Naples, the Tyrrhenian Sea stretching towards Capri, with Mount Vesuvius behind the city. Here, Igshaan Adams’ woven clouds drift outward into the light. Adams’ work, based on aerial photographs of Cape Town townships, maps the movement of people navigating imposed boundaries. The title Keeping Light refers both to resilience and to Italo Calvino’s idea of lightness as a quality that enables movement beyond fixed structures. The clouds, the curator adds, “escape the frame of the space and drift into the world beyond.”

The exhibition closes with works by Tatiana Trouvé and Teju Cole, both resisting literal mapping. Trouvé’s drawings emerge from bleach-stained paper and chart states of forgetting rather than places. Cole’s photographs of erased blackboards at Harvard focus on what remains when language is removed. He describes this turn as a “science of erasure,” prompted by increasing threats to free expression within universities.

Atlante never claims neutrality. Instead, it presents mapping as provisional, ideological, and deeply human. It begins with the map as a tool and ends with surfaces marked by absence, drift, and erasure. In between, it insists on looking slowly, and on staying with uncertainty rather than resolving it – calling for a kind of Keatsian “negative capability.”



Feature image: Installation view of Igshaan Adams’ work in Atlante. Curated by James Lingwood. © The artists. Courtesy the artists and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: M3 Studio