In his short story “On Exactitude in Science” (1946), Jorge Luis Borges writes of an empire where cartography became such an obsession that a 1:1 scale map was created to cover the entire land. As years passed and interest was lost, only threadbare remains of the chart could be found in wind-swept hinterlands. The tale challenges how we see and define the world. Time mocks our attempts to control space. And as factual as we try to be, subjectivity, imagination and the mythic are never far away.
These relationships — tumultuous and generative — are at the heart of the forthcoming Cities, like dreams exhibition at the Tefaf art fair in Maastricht. The title comes from Italo Calvino’s evergreen Invisible Cities (1972): “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, and their perspectives deceitful.”
A collaboration between Daniel Crouch Rare Books and Michael Hoppen Gallery, the exhibition is intended as a corrective to any assumption that maps are just tools. To Crouch, they are vastly more than that. “The great thing about maps is that they are both scientific instruments and works of art,” he says. “I say to my staff that you must remember that what we sell primarily is a story. And that could be about many different things, but they are really only interesting when they tell a story about who we are and what we’re doing.”
