Alterar los márgenes: anomalías en un mapa de Cuzco

Abstract

Abraham Ortelius, the author of the most important cosmography of his time, spoke of himself as a passionate “reader” of maps. According to his proposal, maps work not as documents, but as stories with a capacity for argumentation, intrigue, discursive course and climate conclusion. However, their reading, at least in their colonial mode, is full of dangers, especially if they portray marginal regions, borders and peripheries with respect to the centre of imperial power. On some of these occasions, changes, tropisms, alterations and mixtures occuron the sides of the representation that make the map a hypertext with a strong index load, in a less semiotic than Benjaminian sense of the term and, therefore, capable of going beyond its first referential and illustrative condition. This article studies the configuration of viceregal America and its margins as an “anomalous” space of representation, with the help of an engraving of the city of Cuzco that offers in its strange and anachronistic walls quotes from a peripheral reality, heterogeneous and imprecise.