While in Iraq on a photojournalism assignment, Antonio Ottomanelli created Mapping Identity as a “proposal for an honest redesign of the city of Baghdad, as close as possible to the reality that pervades it.” Baghdad lacks a civilian map and a census; the most commonly used map was made in 2003 by the U.S. army. Through workshops with fine arts students from the University of Baghdad, Ottomanelli created a format to record the spoken stories of their everyday lives and drawings of their daily routes. Narratives interweave with abstract spatial notations that document— against a background of roads, bridges, and houses—the memories of crime, checkpoints, new construction, fears of violent death and optimism for the future. In Istanbul, Mapping Identity Workshop took on a new dimension organized in three steps, referring to a collective intimacy biography:
Project by Antonio Ottomanelli and Paola Villani with Claudia Mainardi, Giacomo Ardesio.
In collaboration with: IRA-C interaction research and architecture in crisis context and Marmara University, Interior Design Faculty

Mapping Identity Workshop in Istanbul – PANORAMIOanalogic ve ATEŞBÖCEĞİ KENT
The workshop had a triple structure based on “Survey” (Investigation), “Story” (Registration) and “Monumentalization”. This structure allowed an organized and positive practice to emerge, and revealed different kinds of experiences faced in other contexts:
Mapping Identity – mental mapping
Private Monuments – events of everyday life focused on perception of the space; study of the anthropologic effects of a specific governance
Subendo -guerrilla design project
The result of the workshop is dual, on one hand there is a multimedia installation, and on the other hand it presents a design project of urban mapping. The outcome is achieved by superimposing two different layers, private monuments and mapping. The first one is PANORAMIOanalogic that changes the spatial dimensions and the format in order to transform the map in a real city. The second one is FIREFLY CITY, where each participant becomes a new storyteller that can affect the urban structure only for a night.