Over at Strange Maps, one of my favorite blogs (how about a daily dose of cartogram? or a diagram of the Eisenhower Interstate system?), there is a short piece on Francesca Berrini, an artist based in Portland. (You can read her bio here. You can also buy her awesome and inexpensive greeting cards here.) She uses pieces of old maps to create new maps of imaginary places.

The following description of her work appears on her website. It is really fascinating:

By recycling different visions of the world, past and present, Berrini hopes to capture her nostalgia for the places that she has not been to. ‘The creation of maps has historically been a painstaking process, meticulously striving for accuracy. I aim to slowly create a separate world from the scraps of my current fascinations. I am reforming the world that is available to me piece by piece to reflect my imagination of what I do not know. A pointless precision beautifully mirroring nothing.’

I am reminded of three things: my childhood fascination with Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine series; Marlowe’s reminiscence on maps in Heart of Darkness; and Baudrillard’s opening invocation of Borges in “The Precession of Simulacra.”

I find something disconcerting and deeply appealing in Berrini’s vision and execution, some fine line dusted between the real and the imaginative, confounding the thinkable and the touchable. There is also a nascent sense of danger; the author at Strange Maps wonders if s/he should be “horrified or fascinated” by these maps. I wonder if the ambivalence comes with the strange beauty of these destroyed and remastered artifacts. There is power in their destruction: one might feel a twinge of worry when destroying a map. What if that which is represented in fact disappears with its representation? We look at the map and we say, “this is it.” This is the Baudrillard thing (which might now be know as The Matrix thing!):

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing)….

Just to say a bit more about the first example, the Griffin and Sabine series: I remember feeling intensely involved with the geography of their relationship, with the movement of their correspondence across space and time. And I reveled in the sense of a world that does not quite exist, but really, almost, could.

This is true, of course, of most fiction, but there is something about Bantock’s intense use of things that usually indicate “real life”– stamps, maps, and historical writings– that made reading him feel less like I was a making a world in my reading and more like I was discovering a new land that I had unknowingly been searching for. His exotic geographies fed my imagination of things about which I may never really know– but which nonetheless felt absolutely familiar. Really.