A painting as a map

The starting point for our meeting will be the work of Julie Mehretu. This artist constructs her paintings like large-format maps of the contemporary world. On her canvases, the lines resemble architectural plans, charts, and movement tracings. However, these are “maps without a legend”—they do not lead us to a single, stable image of the world, but rather reveal its fissures, tensions, and discontinuities.

During the workshop, we’ll treat the map as something much more than just a tool for finding our way. Together, we’ll explore how the combination of art and cartography changes the way we perceive a specific space.

Inspiration and theory: Together, we’ll view selected works from the exhibition and do some simple exercises to get started. We’ll also explore examples of “critical cartography”—a field that demonstrates that every map is someone’s interpretation of reality, rather than an objective, neutral reflection of it.
Creative activity: We’ll move on to a hands-on activity and create our own original forms of mapping. In doing so, we’ll use techniques characteristic of the artist herself. We’ll start by combining drawings, text excerpts, and archival maps of Warsaw (as well as other places in Poland and around the world) to build new, spatial artworks from them.

 

Important Information: This session is an exact repeat of our previous workshop with the same title. If you have already participated in it, please note that the program and all exercises will be exactly the same.

Mikołaj Brzozowski – MSN educator and one half of the osesi collective. He focuses on literary outreach and collaboration with diverse local communities. Co-editor of the publication "Poetry to Immerse Yourself In. A Collection of Poems and Exercises”—a volume of poems and a toolkit for facilitating activities using contemporary poetry. He is a student of cultural studies at the University of Warsaw.