Unconscionable Maps
I’m making an intervention so site specific that it can only be made in the place where it’s going to exist. This project is called Unconscionable Maps and it’s name is taken from Jorge Luis Borges short story “On Exactitude in Science” where he writes about a fictional empire so adept at cartography that they are able to make a map of the exact size and dimensions of the Empire but when but when future generations lose interest in mapmaking the massive maps decay and litter the empire. Jean Baudrillard used Borge’s fable to illustrate what he saw as the inversion of the relationship between models (copies) and reality. He wrote in Simulacra and Simulations. “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 a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory…”
I photograph aspects of the space, usually something unremarkable, print them to a 1:1 scale. The exact size. I make alterations and adjustments and introduce them into the space. Depending on the intervention I may photograph them again and these confounding layers of simulacra create a trompe-l'œil but that still leaves confusion about authenticity of the iterations.
