The Palimpsestic Sketchbook: Iterative Encounters with Place

This article explores the sketchbook as a palimpsestic medium developed through in-situ drawing with a portable camera lucida. Focusing on the I Passaporti sketchbooks produced in Rome, it reflects on how drawing unfolds through this practice. By considering the page as a space negotiated through encounters with place, the discussion approaches the sketchbook as a palimpsestic placeholder, emphasizing its role as a continually recounting structure shaped through drawing. Approaching the page as a site where drawing holds space and place as an ongoing relation, the article elaborates on how experience is registered, revisited and extended across multiple acts of engagement. Unfinished pages remain open to further work, allowing earlier marks to stay present and available within the drawing process. In this way, the sketchbook is positioned as both record and proposition – a portable, tactile field that privileges incompletion, multiplicity and openness. Through its emphasis on movement and iterative engagement, the article situates drawing within phenomenological accounts of place that understand space as lived and continually formed, alongside ideas of walking as enunciation and the drawn line as ongoing correspondence. Together, these perspectives frame the sketchbook as a critical mode of inquiry into drawing as a spatial practice and the fragmentary character of urban experience.