Apr 7, 2017 | editions en, local contemporain en
Do printed maps still matter in our digital age? The availability of digital signal, the demand of real-time data, the omnipresence of telephone that become mobile-compasses, all are often thought to condemn paper. We now know that no map is true, perfectly precise or definitive. Like classic translations, constantly reworked, cartography is a translation amongst others, eternally incomplete and obsolete. Artists never aim to be neutral or exhaustive. Their approach toward scenery is by essence a refusal of the norm, the choice of a personal interpretation, a call to look differently at those landscapes we thought we knew well. Mappages assembles artists who approach maps as a means of expression rather than as orientation tool; questioning the pretence of maps as absolute things; a call to the “map of the day after“, that which would complete the experience of a territory never definitively documented. The French word mappe, old-fashioned and unusual, has been chosen rather than carte. Map and mappe both come from nappe (table cloth). Mappage is a mix between the map and the page: long live printed maps!
“Walking with satellites” is the result of a work carried out over three weeks, with the collaboration of 65 students equipped with GPS receivers; it is both an orientation tool and the story of a collective experiment. 475 kilometres were covered on foot over the 185 hectare campus, while avoiding all existing paths. Roads and buildings disappeared, replaced by loops and convolutions. Under Jeremy Wood’s direction, the Grenoble campus has revealed its unseen and delicate composition. It is a map made of methodical meanderings, second thoughts, day dreams and wanderlust. On the front of the map (the recto) we see the campus’ connection to the city, thanks to the crossing of the Isère, or the discreet presence of the buildings. The map printed on the back reflects a floating silhouette, almost primitive and wild, looming from prehistoric times.
Mappages : Directeur de collection : Guillaume Monsaingeon
ISBN 978-2-9516858-2-6
Prix de vente public : 5 €
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May 12, 2016 | Laboratoire en
The philosopher Daniel Bougnoux thus comments on this disturbing experience of an exhibition where the images are present only in our own mental imagination: “To exhibit only words in a museum, and on this scale, what a challenge! This game of interlockings, and referrals, tells us something about our ways of apprehending and handling the vast world around us. Words will never give us the equivalent of the thing seen, the legible does not equal the visible; and no painting, circumscribed within its frame, will cover the bouquet of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory sensations…, tied together by a landscape. The (semiotic) map is not the territory. But the characteristic of art, or even of a word, is not to represent a world, but to suggest it, to reduce it to a sketch capable of setting a chain of thoughts or sensations on fire. The slow wick of words sets our mental images ablaze…”
On each of the eight walls of the central aisle of the Grenoble Museum are printed pairs of texts:
The first is a fragment belonging to world literature and chosen by one of the invited authors, writer or philosopher: Daniel Bougnoux, Patrick Chamoiseau, Christian Garcin, François Jullien, Jacques Lacarrière, Marie-Hélène Lafon, Céline Minard, Alain Roger.
The second text is a rebound written today by this author and which argues his choice: Why from my mental library retain this fragment: power of a description, arrogance of a proposition, radical questioning of our certainties about the countryside ? And the luxuriance of the sensibilities of the authors chosen refines our understanding of what makes a landscape emerge and impose itself on us: Jean Giono, Stendhal, Aragon, Héraclitus, Balzac, Aimé Césaire, Mario Rigoni Stern, Oscar Wilde (who prophesied in “The Decay of Lying”: “At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them »
