OPEN SPACE 14 | Land in Sight

Maps are very familiar to us. With our smart phones we always carry some about with us, ready to be consulted anytime and anywhere. They help us find orientation, our way across city and country. At the same time we forget all too often how cartography is closely intertwined with power-sustaining knowledge. Not only political maps marking borderlines and allocating dominions are of power-political significance. Topographical maps, too, with their finely drawn lines and colorful markings, lending visibility to elevations and rifts as well as locating geographical territories, serve as instruments of power; at times they also serve as tools of warfare. 

Yet when we open up an atlas and behold the play of colors and shapes we may easily fall for the aesthetic appeal of maps:

“Cartography should finally be numbered among the poetic genres and the atlas itself the belles lettres; after all, it is more than doing justice to its original designation Theatrum orbis terrarum – ‘Theater of the World’. Though the consultation of maps may soothe the very yen for distant places it causes, it is at the same time more than an aesthetic ersatz satisfaction. Those who open up an atlas do not make do merely with visiting individual exotic places, rather, and exorbitantly so, they demand everything at once - the entire world. That longing will always be great, grater than the satisfaction arrived at by reaching the desired. Even today I would prefer the atlas over any travel guide.”

Judith Schalansky, translated from Atlas der abgelegenen Inseln.

The Loris artists take, among other things, the aesthetic and political parameters of mapping for a starting point of their artistic investigation into cartography. It is all about ways of perceiving the world, its measuring, the localization and visualisation of topographic parameters as well as methods of recording such as mapping or notation.

The centerpiece of the exhibition Land in Sicht is a collective work, a wall-hung collage opening itself towards a spatially oriented installation. The collage has an associative assemblage of different materials for its theme. It remains unfinished and, with many cross references, reaches out into the surrounding space. Cross linkages and connections open to many modes of perception are created.

The work method demonstrates the markedly heterogeneous and controversial character of relations within the Loris artists’ group developing their photographic perspective on cartography. Land in Sicht opens up insights into a discursive artistic process and lends visibility to current work results.