Are we what we map? That question inspires the original book The Trace of Maps (geoPlaneta), by the Canarian Kevin Rodríguez Wittmann, an art historian who discovered that his true passion was to scrutinize the cultural message that lies behind the representations that human beings make about places. known, unknown or imagined.
According to Wittmann, maps are definitions of our vision of the world, a reflection of the relationship that each culture has with the space that surrounds it, whether by drawing on paper, engraving on stones or weaving hair or songs. The most surprising thing about the Canarian researcher’s book is that it is not content with tracing a history of this art but rather provides keys to understand how humorous maps were designed, those invented by newspapers eager to sell news, literary ones and those that are instruments of very powerful and dangerous power.
When you were young, were you one of those dreamers who spent an hour looking at a map?
Not as a kid, but then I did look at the atlases of the encyclopedias, open them at random and look for the countries I thought I would visit. And nowadays I also entertain myself by browsing Google Maps. Maps are a kind of invitation to dream and to travel even in an interior way to places that you would not otherwise visit.
How did your interest in cartography arise?
The truth is that it was something quite late, in fact, I had already finished art history and at the end of the master’s degree I saw a medieval map that represented the Fortunate Islands and I began to read about it and compare different maps, and I began to document myself and rethink different situations, to the point of reorganizing my entire life. I understood the cartographic element as a cultural text and a definition of a certain culture or society and I ended up writing my thesis on cartographic history. I got the bug and have been working with maps every day for the 15 years of my life.
What do you see on a map?
I would tell you that I can be consulting the same map for weeks and every time I look at it I appreciate new details, I see information that I had overlooked. A map is a kind of open book, which is always there to surprise you. One writer said it was a way of organizing wonder. I think it’s a good definition.
Is there one in particular that stood out to you?
Several, and also books that I would have liked to write because each person has a different way of seeing maps. But I could cite an author, Alastair Bonnet, who wrote Places without a Map or Off the Map, for example, and I must also cite all those books and literary works that have marked us all and that have an important cartographic component, such as The treasure Island. Who hasn’t dreamed of them as a child?
In your book you refer to Treasure Island.
Because it is a work whose existence depends directly on a map. On a vacation in Scotland with such terrible weather that it did not allow them to go out of the house, Robert Louis Stevenson’s stepson, to kill time, began to draw and at one point he painted an island, which Stevenson saw and began to imagine together. As the writer narrates in his memoirs, while he was drawing the characters of Treasure Island were emerging. He always said that, if it had not been for that moment, his novel would not exist. And it happens in many more cases. The best known is that of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien explained that such a work could only have emerged from a map.
Maps with errors made on purpose, a tradition that is maintained in Google Maps
It has always been a common practice among cartographers to introduce some false details, such as a street, a house, an island or an element that does not exist as a copyright defense. It is as if it were a watermark, to avoid plagiarism because if someone puts the detail that you invented on a map, that is proof that it has been copied. In case of plagiarism, that can be a legal argument to prove it. And, of course, that also invites us to think that a representation that we assume is absolutely real and objective of the world in a neutral way is never exactly like that.
There is a moment when you say that real places don’t appear on maps.
It is a phrase from Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, it is actually a literary device of his, but I relate it to the tradition of songlines, Australian aboriginal songs, which have mapped the Australian territory for millennia. Each Aboriginal community describes what is around them with songs, they have a way of singing to the territory and all those songs together could form the map of Australia.
“Places exist to the extent that we imagine them.” That phrase is yours
Yes, and I relate it to literary maps. There comes a time when maps like those of Tolkien’s Middle Earth come to be believed to exist. But outside the literary context I talk about the ocean, for example, how it was mapped before it was known firsthand. Many times we tend to imagine everything that we do not know, but those imaginary places exist to the extent that we represent them, and that happens at a historical level. For example, at the end of the Middle Ages the British Isles or the Canary Islands were represented sharing space with mythical references such as the island of Brazil or the island of the seven cities, but no one said that some were real and others imaginary.
Maps have also been an instrument of power, they draw the vision of the winner of history.
Clear! Yes, maps have perpetuated power relations throughout history, and that is very evident from the 16th century onwards, when imperialism developed in the crowns of Castile and Portugal. Also in the 19th century, for example, when African territory was divided between different European colonial powers through maps, creating almost square and square borders. Geopolitical tensions and even modern wars and confrontations in the world today come in part from this cartographic design of the world. Countries were created by means of a map, such as Pakistan in 1948, with borders drawn to separate Muslims from Hindus. We see it these days in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, where a new state had to be put on a map. Maps are dangerous, they are almost a weapon of power, a much more powerful tool than it may seem.
There is one thing that has fascinated me and that I didn’t know about: braid maps
That is a real story, an oral tradition from Palenque, the township one hour from Cartagena de Indias, in Colombia, which has a quite specific intangible heritage, based on dance, music, gastronomy, and above all Palenquera braids, which have an origin at the beginning of the 17th century. The slaves were taken to the large American sugar estates and the women gathered at dusk in the courtyards and made braids for the girls in which they represented different elements of the estate or the farm they were on, or that is, small mountains, streams, roads, etc. The slaves understood those codes, they observed them, they looked at them, they memorized them and they managed to escape from that hacienda. The women had more freedom of movement to tour the hacienda and retain that information to represent it in the girls’ hair and that is a very identifying element of San Basilio de Palenque, which was the first free town in America founded by slaves and maroons.
In this Google world is there any map left to draw?
Yes, there are many maps left to be drawn because I always say that there are as many maps as there are people. We all see the world and understand it in a particular and peculiar, different way, and that way can be mapped. And then there are mapped places to visit, which appear on the maps but have not been visited. One of the most paradigmatic cases is North Sentinel Island, in the Andamans, near India, which is inhabited by a people who do not accept visitors and who defend themselves aggressively. It appears on the maps, but we don’t really know what it is like.
And backwards?
Also. There are silences on the maps, those blank places, they continue to exist and have existed voluntarily. An interesting and also quite serious case was that in 2011 Brazil asked Google Maps to eliminate the favelas, that is, to eliminate the images of the favelas in Google Maps, I imagine that to give a certain image of the country with a view to the Soccer World Cup. 2014. So for years Brazilian favelas did not appear on maps. They returned, I think, in 2016 from a project by some NGOs. And that already indicates a certain power relationship, a certain idea of ??wanting to show a certain image of a place.
