2023-4 the atlases

‘the atlases’ 2023-4 

 

The atlas project began reflexively during the globally imposed covid travel restrictions, and evolved as compensation to the physical isolation so pervasive during that time. During the pandemic I became emotionally dependent on the ephemeral body of the internet, circumventing the physical restrictions on travel, but also no longer impeded by physical distance, political boundaries or the presence of one’s actual body, often insurmountable even during ‘normal times’. Virtual global gatherings spontaneously organized became daily practice as we held each other together—families, friends and strangers soon to become friends—through telling and listening to each other’s real lives. My listening became study that was aided at times by an atlas as a compendium guide.

Somehow opening a physical book on the subject of the reality of a physical world was comforting, this particular atlas was a 1989 New York Times Comprehensive version. The USSR remained intact, before what soon would be its breathtaking economic collapse, as did the former Yugoslavia, before the brutality of the civil wars in the Balkans. Berlin was still a divided city. Post-colonial Bombay was not yet renamed Mumbai. Rapid deforestation in the 1980s of the Amazonian rainforest, significantly in Brazil, was reflected in this 1989 mapping of change in habitat. In Niger contamination from the tailings of cold war uranium mines showed clear evidence of seepage into ground water resources. This same 1989 atlas located the Chernobyl exclusion zone in what was then Ukrainian SSR, illusive mapping of contamination put in effect after the 1986 nuclear radiation disaster.

Page by page illuminated the fact that an atlas is neither a neutral nor fixed document, the political boundaries inscribed within the tome are a projection dependent both on the date that the atlas was published and on the publisher’s country of origin and inclination. Political boundaries are ruthlessly jerry rigged onto the geographical reality of our planet, determined by a coalescing of power and resource—inked lines abstracted from a reality of greed and brutality.

The virtual meetings offered testimony to the complex realities not represented in the gestalt of a book. With ‘the atlases’ access to the complexity that is our world is precluded. The tomes are sealed shut, subjected to processes indecent to the book form. ‘the atlases’ have been submitted to topologies of attitude having been drilled, cut, pulped, submerged, partitioned, sutured and stitched—in other words grabbed, plundered and poisoned.  Such is our perverse philosophy of relationship—domination and extraction—with the physical world we inhabit. Considered together a narrative coalesces through ‘the atlases’ of humankind’s irrefutable footprint on the planet.

The project came to its conclusion with ‘the last atlas’. As I sat with the graphite slurry cupped in both hands, patient for the material to solidify, I realized that what I was holding felt like the imprint of a heart. Cast after cast as I bent over the atlas tethered to the cupped hand I understood that what we grab we grab from ourselves. Our bodies are not separate from earth body. The earth’s heart is our heart and that we are irrevocably linked to the temporality, the impermanence, of that reality.  We are temporary guests on this planet of blue. It is our guest house.

 

ann messner       february 2025