Von der Reise zur Karte und zurück

This essay concentrates on the creative potential of mapping for the subsequent processing of travels, experiences, and descriptions as well as on the associated cultural techniques, such as copying, imitating, quoting, de-contextualizing, re-contextualizing, and transplantation. It focuses on the transformation from travel to map and from the map back to the space traveled. Based on examples in which travel knowledge and cartographic skills are intertwined, the essay illuminates the wide spectrum of possibilities and creative processes. To this end, the investigation will consider, first, how the traditional worldviews in the minds of travelers resulted from a process of re-contextualizing through copying and citing; second, the paths of cartographic implementation through transformative imitation and imaginative understanding; third, the concrete expectations for mapping in the process of writing political claims to power; and fourth, the dynamics of transplantation into new areas of knowledge that came with the capturing of new worlds around 1500.