3 minute read
maps and mapping
Stephanie White
'...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied an entire City, and the map of the Empire, an entire Province. In time, these Excessive Maps did not satisfy and the Schools of Cartographers built a Map of the Empire, that was of the Size of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, the Following Generations understood that the dilated Map was Useless and, not without Pitilessness, they delivered it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and the Winters. In the Deserts of the West endure broken Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in the whole country there is no other relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda: Viajes de varones prudentes, libro cuarto, cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658'1
1 Jorge Luis Borges. 'Del rigor en la ciencia' (1946) Historia universal de la infamia, Argentina: Emecé, 1954
Diego Doval, English translation, 2017
This very short story, in its entirety, is an invented quotation on a theme covered by Lewis Carroll's 1895 Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. It is quoted in Umberto Eco's 'On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1' in How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, 1995
On Site review seems to visit maps and mapping frequently, but never as concentratedly as this issue. Maps are essential tools of exploration and conquest: if it can be measured, it can be drawn. If it can be drawn, it can be sold. If it is owned, it can be occupied. Latin Americans have had longer to ponder all this, their period of Spanish and Portuguese colonisation, said to be from 1492 with the arrival of Columbus to 1832 and the onset of the Spanish American wars, left two occupied continents, a postcolonial condition that reverberates from north to south still.
In On Site review 31 (https://onsitereview.ca/31map), Rodrigo Barros, at the time living in Valpairiso, inverted the Mercator projection to position the South as the site of hopes and dreams, not North America, the escalator of power and interference.
The 1913 drawing (below) superimposing European countries on the South American continent, points out just how small and overly-intense Europe was just before WWI. Land mass was not power, influence was. The Mercator projection was never a scientific drawing of the globe, it privileges the North, reducing the two continents of the South to elements smaller than Greenland. Distortions, always distortions.
Many of the essays and projects in this issue of On Site review (https://onsitereview.ca/42atlas) re-think the recording of land by starting with the foot on the ground, rather than the pen on the paper. Possession becomes presence; occupation becomes belonging. This can be read as both dominion and reclamation. Like the inverted North-South drawing, it depends where one stands.
