Edwards Said's notion of Orientalism and the South Pacific Islander's Cargo Cults predates Baudrillard's idea of Hyperreality; each party having constructed their own perceived reality of the Other, retrospectively reinforced by interpreted representations thereof (Coconut headphones, bamboo aeroplanes, images of the orient, etc). The loss or exaggeration of information inherent in the oral tradition fuelled the distorted perception of the Other.
hic sunt dracones (here be dragons), a phrase that appeared on the edges of ancient maps denoting the threshold of geographical knowledge, the zone of ambiguity; the edge where realities are substituted and then reproduced, where the details are fuzzy, where fact and fantasy mix, where information changes between generations and the mistakes that come about through multiple reproduction becomes the new reality.
City Engineer Herbert Manzoni set about, after the second world war, tearing down bombed out sites as well non bombed out sites, clearing slums and redesigning Birmingham; creating a Modernist vision of how a society should operate. Manzoni's palimpsest(ing) of Birmingham was both visionary and bold but, as the social engineering project that was Utopian Modernism started to fail he was demonised for turning Birmingham into a concrete jungle; Manzoni and his work is slowly being undone (palimpsised).
Manzoni's and other post war Modernist's visions are now reduced to traces, cultural reference points, think of the demolition of the Pruitt–Igoe and Charles Jencks' declaration of the birth of Postmodernity; now existing only as oral tradition, a kind of reverse Method of Loci.
The work from the past three years is bracketed by references to geography, Pangaea Liminia immersed the viewer/ audience into an in between world with a map that is universal and at the same time, useless. The Palimpsest series contains maps of geographies that cannot be seen, only their aftereffects can be sensed.
A series of photographs taken of the (blank) pages between the plates of Manzoni's redevelopment plans for post war Birmingham, the continuous palimpsesting and recoding of space and being.
Buckminster Fuller's (BmF) Dymaxion Map offers the least distorted projection of the atlas. The map is famous for the One Island projection, a configuration that shows practically all of the world's land mass as one, enforcing Fuller's idealistic worldview with no north, south or political distortion; a-hierarchal.
BmF's Dymaxion World Map subversively indexed with the Four Colour Theorem, forcibly combining two diametrically opposed concepts gives rise to new possibilities.
Pangaea as presented by the BmF recoding.
Jean Baudrillard compares the fraying of the Jorge Luis Borge's map with the decline of empires, the loss of contact with reality; for Baudrillard this provides an opportunity to set the stage for his seminal work: Simulacra and Simulation, the dawn of Hyperreallity.
Borge alludes to relics, traces of the of the map that still exists in Deserts of the West; reminiscent of the empires' influence on the territories (Baudrillard), like the Archimedes Palimpsests these could be described as Scriptio Inferior (leftover/ reemerging traces from palimpsest).
Recoding the Four Colour Theorem BmF map to read as a succession of world colonisations would not only doubly disrupt the BmF idealism but could also become a vehicle for exploring the earlier recodings of space and being left behind after de-colonisation e.g. colonial
languages, religions, borders, roads and buildings.
The viewer is presented with a deadpan westernised reading (left to right, top to bottom) of the succession of modern world colonisations. Projected into the corner of the space, the BmF Recoding imbeds itself into the architecture as opposed to just sitting on a 'flat' gallery wall surface; activated and activating the gallery space.
So we now use the the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well. (Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, Carroll, L.) read more
Alfred Korzybski's (Founder of General Semantics) the "map is not the territory" and "the word is not the thing" suggests that we can never entirely "know" the world or an object as the language we use, visual or phonetic, fails to fully describe it.
The language of maps is a powerful tool that can distort reality to promote a political image, hide the truth, or even present outright lies as reality; the modern tradition of map making is after all a result of keeping and exerting control.
The truth in the map is differed, it sits outside itself, even Carroll's suggestion that the physical geography should be used as its own map becomes a questionable solution when we consider that even real can become the unreal.
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hypperreal. The territory no longer preceeds the map, nor does it survive it. It is never the less the map that proceeds the territory - pressesion of simulacra- that engenders the territory. (Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard, J.)
The potency of all three the pieces lies in the wider setting of the work in an art school/ gallery space in Bournville; designed as an idyllic worker village, a concept that is no longer applicable unless it's in the facade. The traces of what Cadbury designed are visible, the Quaker religion is still practiced but the concept has been bought up wholesale by a large conglomerate.
We sail amongst the dragons.
