The Contact Zone

The Contact Zone is a project that investigates the relationships between colonial ideology and the imaginary processes of reconfiguration of the Other. The title “ The Contact Zone” has been borrowed from a concept developed by professor Mary Louise Pratt and refers to the spaces of colonial encounters in which individuals, separated by geography and history, establish asymmetrical and permanent relationships among themselves. Inspired by this definition I felt motivated to develop a series that investigates and determines the shape and the borders of these zones of contact. Divided into 4 chapters, the project alludes to the Age of Discoveries and appropriates Columbus’ chronicles of his first voyage toward the Americas to show the way the Western world, through travel literacy and illustration, managed to produce differentiated conceptions of itself in comparison to what has been labelled as “the rest of the world”, perpetuating asymmetries and differences in collective imagery.