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The research we are going to illustrate is focused on visual and linguistic representations which people give of their own places of origin. Interviewees were asked to make a drawing representing their own places of origin and they were also asked to write a short explanation or commentary on the back side of the drawing. The team included nine people who are scholars from different disciplines such as Semiotics, Psychology and Geography. My personal contribution to this work, in addition to the supervision assignment, is focused on a semiotic classification of genres of maps based on specific semiotic layers of the drawings.This work will hopefully show that different disciplines can cooperate, even though each of them maintains its specificity. The interviewees were mostly students, in their early twenties, who were attending different Universities in Italy, in Oregon and in Belgium. They came from many countries, hence the comparison between different cultures and backgrounds is one of the most interesting aspects of the research.We aim at answering some questions: (1) how visual language and verbal language integrate each other in the reconstruction of a memory (2) how people nowadays experience the memories of their places of origin, in an era marked by large displacements and diminished sense of belonging to a place (3) how the past is expressed through its spatial dimension; (4) how cognitive and emotional components (positive/negative feelings towards the place of origin, how deeply a subject feels to be tied to that place, etc.) work together in the reconstruction of the past.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-00973-1_27

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