A Story To Tell: Seeing Through the Minds of Two Admirals

This study approaches the Piri Reis map as a visual artifact which functions more than just as a map because of the story (great discoveries of his time and Columbus’s journeys) it tells through visual and textual elements and how these elements are arranged to create connection to the history, memory and experiences of Christopher Columbus and Piri Reis. By analyzing the story Reis tells in his map, this study approaches his work as a metaphorical contact zone where two different socio-cultural contexts and two different cultural perceptions and experiences come together. To reveal these different layers of cultural and individual experiences and how they work together to convey meaning, this study applies Amy D. Propen’s “visual-material rhetoric” as its central methodological framework, and a secondary approach by Kent C. Ryden will be used to show the connection between space and place.