Artifact & Atlas

Mapping the Mediterranean

Mapping is a practice that catalogs the physical and the cultural. That which is built and imagined. It is a practice becomes vehicles for both how we see the past and how construe our futures. Artifact and Atlas is double-sided triptych that explores the ways in which opposing views and agendas might manifest themselves in the depiction of places and in the imaging of our cities.

Term: Winter 2018

ARCU4304: Urbanism in Practice 4: Global Context

Professor: O. Saloojee

Project Partner: Charles-Étienne Déry

T: Public Polis / Fluid Infrastructure

MAPPING THE MEDITERRANEAN AND MIGRATION

In geography, we explore how maps act as tools for political representation. No map is an end in itself but rather a means to something else. For this phase in the project, I worked with Charles-Étienne Déry to produce a double sided-tryptch.

Each side of the tryptch assumes a particular political idealogy thereby infusing each map with a particular interpretation of the issue. Working independantly but apart, we each produced one complete side of the panels. Read together, these two act as visual dialectic representing each other’s thesis and anti-thesis. One side speaks to connectivity and the vitality that emerges from an interconnected system, the other speaks of a world made stable through territory and defense.

With the maps acting more as cerebral pieces, the artifacts we casted assume a more subdued but visceral tone. We casted a total of 6 “artifacts” – images that expand the narrative of our maps.