Crafting Between Maps, Powders, Pigments, and the Specter of Modern Science: Handmade Relief Models as Ontological Operations and Experiments

Handmade relief models are three-dimensional, true-to-scale models that re-present landscape sections like mountains. Departing from the rhetoric according to which they ought to be realistic, accurate, and mimetically resemblant renderings of Nature to rather seek approaching them as and in practice, this article ethnographically unfolds their crafting. The preparatory stage of model manufacturing depends on an ecology of practices and collaboratively established “chains of reference,” which inter-lend a very specific form of “truth.” The actual modeling stage involves “chains of touch,” where the ontological tact of the craftsperson attunes to the re-activity of materials. In a trial of strength where meaning and matter, stories and materialities entangle in practice, the dominant epistemological rhetoric of modern science also takes on the role of a full-fledged actor, an order-word that disciplines the practice of crafting models. Therefore, the apparent correspondence between the original mountain and its representational, modeled copy in fact relies on a co-respondence between the materials, the skilled body of the craftsperson, the technical tools, and the order-word that imposes the main objective of the modeling. Finally, relief models, once in circulation, become ontological operators in the collective invention of what a mountain is , with their ontopolitical presuppositions and ramifications.