Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

The exhibition “The cartography of the Unseen” examined various practices of mapping, some are traditional and some belong to a new phase in this field enabled by the increasingly potent technologies of sensing, sampling, organizing and displaying spatial information. The exhibition offers a political reading of mapping, either as exposure of the overt and covert mechanisms embedded in cartography, either as invitation to act within the mapped territory to bring about change. In these contexts, the exhibition reflects upon the current change of hand in the power over knowledge controlling centers, in transition from being a prerogative of the world nation-states to being the operative areas of huge companies developing new platforms for mapping. The exhibition brings to light the potential for liberation that is seemingly inherent in the processes of democratization and self-description embedded in mapping and in the practices of collaboration, producing a point of view that is located outside the system. The multiple implications presented are a growing reality derived from the possibilities of mapping in volumes and scales that were never possible before.

The space of the gallery was designed as a three-dimensional map, a meta-map generating maps within maps; it spatializes two-dimensional maps into an all-encompassing three-dimensional physical space. The colored legend and the tags appearing throughout the gallery and on the floor provide coordinates on the basis of keywords, enabling orientation in a condensed space filled with information. QR-codes printed under each of the maps rearrange the gallery space and integrate the texts that appear on the walls with the maps scattered in its space – by that delivering a reality both mapped and augmented.