Gilane Tawadros: 'Map'
In: map. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1996, 1-01 - 1-02.
This book and the exhibition Maps Elsewhere (Beaconsfield, London 22 March - 28 April 1996) have emerged from a unique collaboration between the artists and curators involved in this project and from our shared preoccupation with maps and the process of mapping. The idea for the project came from an evolving artistic dialogue between the artist Jo Stockham and the writer Deborah Levy that began in 1989 when they met for the first time in Cambridge (while Jo was an artist-in-residence at Kettle's Yard and Deborah was a Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College). Their dialogue has centred on a common interest in maps and mapping and has developed over an informal exchange of images, texts, conversations and methodologies that consider ways to reinvent the maps conventionally drawn around both physical and psychological geographies. Drawing on their artistic practice, Jo Stockham and Deborah Levy together with Beaconsfield, Chris Ofili, Alistair Raphael and Anne Tallentire have collaborated with David Chandler and myself to create the publication Map which brings together a diverse collection of images and texts, charting various personal, physical and psychological geographies.
Map is by no means a comprehensive survey of artists' maps or written texts concerned with mapping, but rather a subjective and partial selection which reflects the collaborative and haphazard intersection of individual interests and experiences which coalesced in this publication. Like maps, the texts and images gathered here are no more than fragments which suggest a singular view, a way of seeing the world which can be contradicted by another fragment, another way of seeing. Maps, like paintings, are two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional space. They translate the space and time which we occupy into a flat representation which inevitably betrays our understanding of the world and our perception of our relationship to it.
Map is divided into three sections. The first section consists of texts and bibliographical references to texts, both fictional and non-fictional, ranging from Andre Brink's An Instant in the Wind and an extract from Wilson Harris' novel Palace of the Peacock to Edward W. Said's Culture and Imperialism and Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space. The third section could be described as an atlas of artists' maps and desires, consisting of an eclectic array of artists' works and diagrams from Vermeer to Bhimji, from Mohoky-Nagy to Bennett. Wedged between these two sections are a series of individual 'lost testimonies", edited by Deborah Levy.
We are grateful to the artists involved in this project for committing so much of their time, energy and creativity to this book and to the exhibition. Our warm thanks to the artists, writers, private owners, museums, galleries, libraries and other institutions who kindly gave their permission to include their images and texts in this volume and to all those individuals who have contributed and assisted in the production of this volume including Maria Amidu, David Chandler, Victoria Clarke, Herman Lelie, Kit Taylor and Uwe Kraus.