Since ancient times, human beings have tried to give shape to their own thought, to organize — through philosophies and scientific theories — all fields of knowledge and human experience in order to create a navigable map. Symbolic geography arises from this same need for orientation: it is both a cognitive model — because it traces imaginary territories in which the relations between different spheres of human life unfold — and an artistic device, born of invention and serving as a generative tool for creative development.
For this reason, I conceived an island in which political borders represent lines of meaning: Solaria, the island of knowledge and human activity, a place where each region embodies a different way of thinking and living in the world. It is a symbol and a map that helps orient my personal artistic expression in its three dimensions: symbolic, mathematical, and musical.
Seven territories
The island is divided into seven regions corresponding to the five central fields of human activity — nature, technique, science, communication, philosophy and religion — along with two smaller islands that represent art and consciousness. The number seven does not arise from an aesthetic intuition, but from the desire to condense all areas of human knowledge into a coherent system.
The spheres of human activity are infinite, and the regions of Solaria could have been countless, as happens for example in academic taxonomies, but the choice fell on seven for conceptual and symbolic reasons.
The five central regions
Each central territory corresponds to a fundamental question: philosophy and religion address the “why” of the human being, science the “why” of things, technique the “how,” communication the “who,” and nature the “where.” The selection emerged through condensation, choosing the areas that act as matrices for all the others. For example, fields such as economics, medicine, ecology, pedagogy, psychology, history, and politics have been traced back to the five main regions according to their epistemological origin — that is, the question from which they arise and the form of knowledge they embody. This is why each of these territories contains within itself many other fields of knowledge.
Iridia
The region of nature, called Iridia, includes ecology, geography, agriculture, zoology, botany, meteorology, and all the sciences directly connected to the study, care, and protection of living matter. For this reason, it also includes medicine, understood as the ecology of the human body.
Theknus
Tekhnus, the region of technique and production, includes economics, craftsmanship, engineering, architecture, mechanics, cooking, and every form of material transformation requiring practical skills, to which sport and physical activity are added, understood as the transformation of the human body.
Axia
The inhabitants of Axia devote themselves to science, and therefore to mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, logic, geometry, and all the disciplines that seek the laws governing reality.
Castalia
Castalia, which takes its name from the region in which Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game is set, is the territory of communication and the social sciences, including linguistics, rhetoric, pedagogy, psychology, sociology, politics, law, and history — that is, everything that concerns human relationship, including play, and the transmission of thought, values, and information within human organization.
Altaluna
Finally, Altaluna is the place devoted to philosophy and religion, where ethics, metaphysics, theology, spirituality, mysticism, and reflection on the meaning of existence are studied. Altaluna owes its name to the human longing to reach the light, represented by the sun (the entire island is called Solaria), toward which the moon — shining with reflected light — rises and leans, as a symbol of thought seeking truth.
The smaller islands
The two smaller islands differ from the central regions because they represent the path of human experience, understood as the passage through the five main territories. This path has two poles: Alma and Eos, consciousness and art.
Eos
Art is the point of synthesis of all the central regions: it arises from science and technique, it converses with nature and with other human beings, and it questions the human being about the meaning of existence, bringing together philosophical thought and spiritual dimension. The island of Eos is the cradle of all symbolic and creative forms of expression — music, painting, sculpture, dance, theatre, poetry, and literature — where matter and spirit find their visible unity.
Alma
Alma is the region that embodies the mystery of conscious life, the original sphere from which all knowledge and every human action draw their impulse. It is the seat of the question of meaning that inhabits the human being and drives them to transform, communicate, create, educate, pray, nourish themselves, move, and understand. In Alma, life is not yet divided into its fields but pulses as a unified principle: it is from here that all forms of human action are born, and to here that they return.
Eos and Alma form the two poles of a single orbit: consciousness finds its response in artistic experience, and art, in turn, leads consciousness back to its origin, in the very mystery of existence. Between them unfolds the variety of life and its disciplines, which arise from the ceaseless movement between interiority and manifestation. For this reason, the two smaller islands stand at the two ends of the central regions.
The war
Now it happens that Theknos and Iridia, the Southern Lands, wage war against the Boreal League — Axia and Castalia; a war that is not merely about territorial control. It is a clash between two ways of interpreting the world. As I will explain further on, each region corresponds to a polarity of the seven natural elements: light, matter, energy, space, time, information, and consciousness. The two coalitions represent interdependent and complementary dimensions, yet each side strives to prevail over the other without recognizing its own value in its relationship with what is different from itself.
From this tension arises the idea of the digital and acoustic wind, which I have translated into the musical composition I will soon publish.
Altaluna, the territory of soul and spirituality, is divided, while Alma and Eos remain neutral.
To listen to and learn about the first two parts of my composition, you can watch the related videos on YouTube:
01 - The game of music: winning or playing?
02 – The Game of Music: I created a palindromic composition
Or listen to it directly on Spotify: