Mappings of One Hundred Years of Solitude
Series of Speculative Architectural Cartographies
A1 Hybrid Drawings. Graphite and Ink on Mylar Paper and Digital Drawing
In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the house of the Buendía family is the principal architectural setting. Within this house, the transformations of a simple dining table allude to greater and abstract societal shifts, such as the arrival of an ‘avalanche of foreigners’ into town. The novel employs magical realist literary devices to combine divergent elements in time, space, and reality, creating an intertextual representation of place. The series of nine large format cartographies titled Mappings of One Hundred Years of Solitude map key places in García Márquez’s novel, exploring ways in which these literary devices can inflect cartographic strategies of speculative architectural drawing. The work aims to increase drawing’s capacity to engage places in their duration, accounting for individual and social narratives that inhabit and produce them.
The cartographies start from the in-between space of the patio (Spanish for courtyard) of the Buendía’s house. As a fulcrum of the novel’s spatiotemporal contexts, the patio witnesses the curious and fantastical events that bridge familial, cultural, or societal contexts over seven generations of the family. The first cartography, titled Magical-Real Events Around the Patio, plots key familial events wihtin and around the patio. It allows for the visualisation of multiple scales and temporalities that produce the family’s relations to place. Building from the contours of these events further cartographies interrogate other eight contexts narrated in the novel:
1. Magical-Real Events Around the Patio
2. Archaeological Plan of the Buendía’s House
3. Melquíades’s Archive
4. Innocent Yellow Train Station
5. A Clearing in the Jungle
6. Untraceable Massacre Square
7. Dinning Room
8. Fernanda’s Room
9. Macondo: A Multitudinous Fair
︎magical.realist.cartographies
Research Project
Year: 2022
Concept:
Luca Penteado Caiaffa
