An Atlas of Radical Cartography is:
A) a book
b) a smart collection of maps and essays
c) a traveling exhibition
Organized by Alexis Bhagat and Lize Mogel, the Atlas is all three. The book contains a smart collection of essays about how the political power inherent in mapping is played out in realtime, as well as a great collection of fold out maps that perform a sort of reclamation of the map form. The contributors come to the issue from a range of backgrounds, architects, artists, designers, activities, the list goes on. They also offer an equal diversity of aesthetic responses, many are striking vector graphics, some poetic and textual, some hand-drawn, all beautifully offset-printed.
I was fortunate enough to see this work displayed in it’s exhibition mode (triple-changer transformer, anyone?) at BASEKAMP, a Philadelphia based collective/arts/discourse space on a night when Lize and Alexis were on hand to provide a tour of the work. This was useful since most of the work is very context specific and I hadn’t yet read the collection of essays in the book.
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