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Cultures & Conflits
Vancouver
is not where it is supposed to be
November 2009, Paris
Landon Mackenzie et Didier Bigo |
DB : Landon, in your painting, you challenge the traditional
representation of the world as a world
of states (no national boundaries) and even as a world
of natural geography (no differentiation
between sea and land), and the effects are astonishing.
Could you give us some elements about
this eradication of the traditional boundaries ?
LM : Here we are talking about a specific piece called
Vancouver as the Centre of the World,
2009, which began with questions of how I could reorganize
the world onto a rectangular space
while placing Vancouver at the centre. This geography
seemed unfamiliar. It meant placing
Russia above Canada over the pole without using a computer
to figure it out. I started by getting
several maps that are currently sold and still classically
used. The ones where Greenland is
long and narrow, the ones where it is big and broad,
and as I was buying them the man in
the store said, “You know, Greenland is actually
smaller than Zaire”. Though we know it
intellectually it is still a shock to hear about this
distortion because we actually start to believe
the maps ! I went to examine his statement and two things
happened : One is that I immediately
reviewed the problem of what is in a name as there are
several names attached to these two
locations including contemporary, historical, colonial,
pre-colonial and linguistic. The other is
the fact that in square kilometers the country in question,
now called the Democratic Republic
of the Congo, in the middle of Africa and on the equator,
is indeed bigger than the space in
the north despite the dramatically different representation
in the world. On top of this add the
reality that Greenland is shrinking as the ice cap melts
or falls away, and that it is even smaller
today than when the survey was taken. Further a map does
not explain why this geography is
politically not part of Canada as all the other arctic
islands in the region are.
To read the full interview with illustrations, download
the pdf 
