Other cartographies
Every cartography is a representation in the plane of a complex and multiple surface. The main difficulty in its construction, the passage from the sphere to the plane, was resolved in the I century A.D. and it has been improved through progress in the cartographic projection techniques with the incorporation of the meridian and parallel reticules. The political maps, representations of the boundaries of a country and the limits of a nation-state, are without doubt the most arbitrary ones because they do not reproduce, as is the case of the geological, hydrological and vegetation maps, concrete and natural phenomena. Instead, they are historical processes that are constantly undergoing change and modification, according to the effects that the dynamics of political forces and international relations have over their lines. Nevertheless, the force of convention turns the map of a country, particularly its surroundings, into an icon, into a gestalt that can be identified in an instant.

Other Cartographies present the reflections of Argentinean artists from diverse generations upon the cartographies constructed in order to make the world more predictable. Facing the changing reality that determines a less predictable world, the artists elaborate maps of their own, they work upon them or reinvent them, under different territorial and spatial operations, relevant under the conditions of globalisation, they are quoted alluding to regionalism, globalisation, their limits, their boundaries, their nomenclatures and to the relation between civilisations.

The works account for an intellectual practice, which by identifying the crisis, pretends to rearrange the relation between territory and socio-economic and political space, transcending the boundaries of geography. The uncertain direction from the political and economic flux, that lacks historical precedents as well as the awareness of a contingent process full of conflicts and tensions, loaded with challenges, is present. Within it one finds the recomposition of power, the transformation of the notion of a nation-state as a self-governed and autonomous unit, the social and economic activity, tied to non-national territorial limits and the strengthening of the transcontinental patterns of social action.

The relational thought that they account for, centres its analysis in the World space and arising from critical and playful visions they express their concern for what it is at Stake: the concept of a world, of society, of country. Each artist’s interest agrees with their beliefs and reminds us that the objects of art are no different from other sociological objects, that art creates its own world and it builds itself as the extra-aesthetic transformation of reality in which the artist concentrates their strength in those spheres whose results they investigate with a growing freedom.

Jean Beaudrillard affirms “Today there is nothing left but the map; virtual abstraction of the territory; these maps still float and drift and with them go some fragments of the real” in “the assassination of the real”. Immanuel Wallerstein in “The end of the world as we know it” suggested that the modern world system is reaching its end, entering a transition to a new historical system whose contours we don’t yet know, but whose structure we can help model.

It is interesting to think that together with the possible falling into disuse of the traditional representation of the world, through this crisis it is pertinent to keep up hope that a new type of society will appear that makes use of territories that include means of communication, in a way that has never occurred before in the past, expanding culture everywhere. It is in that communicational dimension where art constitutes itself as a tool that allows human development.

Micaela Patania*
Curator

(*) NYU Museum Studies