Lize Mogel, "mappa mundi", 27x 24",
2008
Mappa mundi is part of an ongoing project that explores two kinds of popular representations
of the World‹the iconic world map and the international spectacle of World¹s Fairs.
As technology and commerce blur more and more geographic boundaries, the
ubiquitous world map becomes inadequate to describe the intricacies of
globalization. Mappa mundi is an attempt to remake the world map, relying on
associative geographies rather than physical ones.
These experiments within the confines of the specific form of the world map reconfigure
it to create new geographies which represent contemporary global situations.
Familiar borders are denied, and new connections between places are brought to
the surface. This map mash-up is more conducive to narratives of globalization,
but more difficult, disorienting.
Mappa mundi draws relationships between the 1915 San Francisco Worlds Fair; the
Panama Canal; the Northwest Passage in Canada; a mothballed naval fleet in the
Suisun bay near San Francisco; shipbreaking sites in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh,
and China; and the North Pole. These are linked by common narratives of
shipping, sovereignity, commerce, and exploitation (of resources and people).
The map plays with scale‹cities are rendered as large as nations; an
archipelago of decommissioned ships links one place to another, one part of the
story to another. Mappa mundi refers to medieval world maps that sometimes conflated real and imaginary
geography, made at a time when the complete picture of the physical world was
still being formed.
Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices
between art and cultural geography. She inserts and distributes and cartographic
projects into public space and in publications. She is co-editor of the
book/map collection "An Atlas of Radical Cartography" and co-curator
of the internationally touring exhibition "An Atlas". Exhibitions include
the Gwangju Bienniale (South Korea,) common room (NYC), Casco
(Netherlands), and ³Experimental Geography² (ICI, touring).
