The other day I was getting ready traveling and rummaging through a drawer looking for an old leather wallet in which I carried my travel documents. When I found it, in one of the sleeves was a worn, fold-out street map of Paris that was at least ten years old.
I haven’t used a real road map in years. But there was a time in my life when you couldn’t find me without some kind of map in my purse or pocket. Before the mad advance of smartphones, I relied on them to navigate my way through cities while driving or walking, even if I wasn’t always good at reading them. I’m having a hard time figuring out what on the map directly correlates to what I’m experiencing in real life.
But I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of maps, that you could chart a path through some part of your life, trusting that you’d be properly guided by someone else’s research, discoveries, and renderings. All maps aim to draw a narrative about what exists, what perspective is central, what can be trusted, and what is of value to our attention.
Johannes Vermeer used maps in many of his outstanding paintings; in the 17th century they were a common motif in both Dutch paintings and Dutch interiors as decorative elements. In the 1663 painting “Woman Reading a Letter,” a large portion of a map (based on a real 1620 map by Balthasar Florisz van Berckenrode) forms the backdrop to the scene.
A young woman, dressed in a loose cornflower-blue gown and loose taupe skirt, stands at the edge of a table, peering at a letter she holds in her hands. The morning light enters through the invisible window. The muted palette of cream, blue, dark brown, and black gives the painting an intimate, soft, enclosed feel.
‘Woman Reading a Letter’ by Johannes Vermeer (c1662-63) © Alamy
Her body, positioned in the center of the frame, forms a triangular shape which directs our attention both to her and to the map on the wall behind. Her head, colored in a similar way to the map, almost merges with it. And the lower edge of the map falls directly on her heart line. We are drawn to the world inside her, where her attention is drawn to what she reads in the letter.
The map in this painting seems symbolic of the relationship between what is happening in the outside world – the world of the letter and its sender – and the woman’s inner world: what the letter makes her feel, think and desire. Where would those feelings, thoughts, and desires take her if she could move as freely as she wanted, beyond this room, beyond the house, beyond social expectations and the limitations of time?
I wonder what might be more apparent to us and others if we created maps that charted our lives across a year-long season. The places we go or don’t go and the frequency of these movements would say a lot about the things and people who are important to our lives, and also about what we are related to, willy-nilly. The places we find ourselves in can speak to the things that limit us as well as those that give us a sense of freedom, agency, and expansion.
I love the way that artist born in Madagascar Malala Andrialavidrazana recreates maps to challenge and stimulate thinking about the representation of knowledge systems, narratives and perspectives. The complex and layered 2018 work “Figures 1852, River Systems of the World” is part of a series that began in 2015, and is currently on display at the exhibition Indigo Waves and other stories at the Gropius Bau in Berlin.
In it, a world map is covered with images of people, cultures, ways of production and ways of life. Just off-center is an indigo woman at the helm of a boat; alongside his drawings of first nation people, groups dressed in Western dress, armies, irrigation systems, and caricatured figures working farmland.
Fascinated by 19th-century maps and the history of Western exploration and nation-building, in this series Andrialavidrazana scoured archives to find photographs, drawings from history and science books, engravings, texts, postage stamps, bank currencies and other items ephemera, which he brings together in a large-scale collage work that illustrates how different cultural narratives have been excluded from traditional systems of power and privilege. His art imagines how different representations of history and place can exist simultaneously and non-hierarchically, in contrast to 19th century cartographers who were committed to the global expansion of Western ideals and power.
Andrialavidrazana’s work reminds us that we live within and according to embodied systems of knowledge that are rarely questioned or reconsidered as simply one among many. Maps contain stories about where the power lies, and inherent in the history of map making are narratives about how we should collectively live.
It makes me think of the maps we carry with us of family, culture and nation. As an Igbo woman of Nigeria, I grew up with fixed narratives about many things, from the roles of women and men to the value of the elderly and the importance of work, knowledge and intellect. I was also raised with particular narratives about my own family’s experiences. All these things are a kind of map-making: they establish paths that I should have followed to build a life of my own, without questioning or even awareness. We all have our versions of this. But Andrialavidrazana’s work reminds me that maps, even personal ones, can be reconfigured to better align with our experience and our way of being, with a little work and awareness. We need to rethink who the map makers are in our lives.
MC Escher’s woodcut from 1963 “Mobius strip II” it may seem like an odd image to include on maps and how we navigate our lives. But I was struck by what this image suggests about finding our way in the world.
Nine fire ants are traveling in an infinite loop around an olive green Möbius strip. Ants are fascinating creatures. They have a type of internal mapping system that uses what scientists call idiotic cues (self-movement cues) to help them find their way back to their nests or colonies. But a Möbius strip is a surface that wraps around itself and has no boundaries. It is a non-orientable surface, with no discernible start or end point.
There are times in our lives when none of the maps we use to find our way seem to work. Our routines, our almost automated ways of navigating the world, are chaotically disrupted because something changes. Maybe we move, maybe we get sick, maybe we leave a marriage, maybe there’s a global pandemic, maybe there’s a financial crisis. Whatever it is, for a period of time there seems to be no way around it.
We will all find ourselves in that position at some point in our lives. And it’s worth remembering. But it’s also worth remembering that we’re often more resilient than we give ourselves credit for, and sometimes it takes a seemingly difficult-to-orientate experience to propel us into new routines and create a path for ourselves. This type of remapping requires remembering that our bodies as well as our minds have knowledge for us.
When the usual landmarks in our lives are lost, we have to find new ways to navigate. Paying attention to what we perceive and feel, while honoring and trusting our needs and intuition, can be a powerful start to finding our way back to ourselves. All maps can be redrawn.
Follow Enuma on Twitter @EnumaOkoro or email her at enuma.okoro@ft.com
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