Lines Upon Surfaces

Abstract

Architecture, art and design have always worked with lines, whether as means of representation, of measurement or of illustration. What those lines do once they operate in the world, beyond the drawing, remains a question these disciplines have rarely posed. The dossier “Lines Upon Surfaces” from Revista 180 pursues that question.

To that end, it presents an interview with the English anthropologist Tim Ingold, in which he revisits the ideas surrounding his linealogy, developed in the books Lines: A Brief History (2007) and The Life of Lines (2015).

Ingold’s text is accompanied by images from Italian Limes (2014–2019), a research and cartographic project by Studio Folder (Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual) that tracks the displacement of the Alpine watershed as glaciers recede due to climate change.

The dossier closes with a text where both arguments meet. Writing from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the anthropologist Cristián Simonetti conceptually takes up the same Alpine sensors used by Ferrari and Pasqual, imagining them installed in the south of Chile, where some fifty kilometres of the boundary between Chile and Argentina remain undefined beneath the ice.

Taken together, the three works in this dossier describe a passage that sets out the different lives of lines. It begins with the line traced on paper, passes through the line verified on the ground, and ends with the line the ground itself produces. At each step, the drawing yields some of its authority over the world it claims to order.