Detail: '"How do we know that we are not living in a grand map, doing its best to represent a reality we don't recognize?"
Never perfect, never complete, never comprehensive, always tentative, wanting, deficient, the map insistently makes us aware of that unrepresentable whole, that catholic embrace of all things, also known as reality. The map, in fact, upsets any representational faith we might still sport and leaves us in savory shambles. It deconstructs realities, it suggests certain paths, particular possibilities, suggestive options, while at the same undermining any secure grasp we might have thought we had for a moment on our existential context, or on, in other words, life.
Mapping is, in fact, not a mimetic exercise, a process of analogue imitation by way of reduction and abstraction, a means towards the splendid and refractory lives of copies and reproductions. Maps are, rather, paralell worlds, rich and powerful out of their own specific properties, producers of other spaces and alternative geographies. And exactly because of this: resourceful and productive and beautiful instrumentalities for the contemporary moment, for navigation –or withdrawal? in these strange times in the midst of the landscapes of terror, fear and loss, of the territories of restricted movement, control and surveillance, of borders which are walls, of globalization with its promises and defeats.
BB3 attends to the geographical turn in contemporary creativity and currrent representational practices. Promoting cartographic literacy, imagining the map as a problematic and unpredicatable and productive and liberating instrument, BB3 invites mapmakers, cartographers, navigators, mapreaders, guides, maptravelers, mapprogrammers, mapdevotees, mapdestroyers of all kinds. Join us in mapping our moment, join us in being exactly here, which, as Joyce had it, is the same as being everywhere. And nowhere.'
~ Curatorial team of BB3