How does one create a space without end, without borders, not even a physical extension? Some maps do not represent geographical territories, and yet they help one find one’s way, navigating a system, visualizing possible itineraries and traffic flows. “I map the social and political territory in which I live,” is what Mark Lombardi (1951–2000) said about his series of diagrams that he began in 1994 in Huston, and which ended with his tragic death in New York.

Many artists as well as philosophers have claimed the position of cartographer, surveyor, explorer of visible and invisible dimensions. “I am a cartographer,” Michel Foucault declared in a 1975 interview. Writing has “to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come,” Deleuze and Guattari stated in A thousand Plateaus.¹ Inspired by the developments of conceptual art, Lombardi’s diagrams have often been described and interpreted in reference to these thinker-cartographers: Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. While the geographical meaning of the word “map” designates the graphic representation of a territory on a support (globe, paper, canvas, atlas), its more abstract philosophical definition elicits a spontaneous connection with Lombardi’s work.

A Networks System

Lombardi’s diagrams are the result of the artist’s insatiable curiosity about government scandals. For years on end, first as a researcher at the Everson Museum and then as a sideline to his activities as a librarian in Houston, he meticulously documented the alliance networks between political and financial milieus on a global scale. His

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