The Artists Countermapping the World

At the Royal Museum for Central Africa on the outskirts of Brussels are four monumental wall maps from 1910 depicting Belgian colonial interests. They are dense with information: the exchange rates of resources, pricing structures tied to extraction, and, more chillingly, the market value assigned to enslaved people. These were not simply records of an empire, but instruments that diagrammed how land could be occupied and made profitable. It's an image that stuck with me since I first saw them last winter, perhaps because it’s the clearest example I have seen of violence embedded in systems of land measurement, but also because they were originally installed to persuade viewers to invest in the enterprise of Belgium’s colonial expansion. Protected by national heritage laws, they remain fixed to the walls, now serving as the backdrop to displays of objects and resources acquired, in part, through the extractive logic they encode.

Maps appear objective, yet they are built from choices that frame a particular view of the world. They are doubly instructional in the knowledge they share and in the ways they orient the viewer, offering a surface on which land appears ordered, bounded, and knowable. A run of recent exhibitions in New York of the works of late Venezuelan conceptual artist Claudio Perna, Chicano artist Sandy Rodriguez, and Dominican artist Firelei Báez brings that charged surface into focus across generations of artists who take up cartography’s capacity for orientation and put it to work otherwise: turning maps from tools of classification into frameworks for examining movement, memory, and power.