Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Panorama)

Wall Installation

2005 - 2015

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum is an ever-expanding collection of photographs (over 9.000), made by the artist and assembled since 2005, that observe how people organize their living environments across the world. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum manifests itself in different public forms.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Panorama) consists of printed photographs, pasted in a grid over several walls, in a fashion loosely modeled on the Myorama – a nineteenth-century children’s game consisting of a set of illustrated cards that could be endlessly arranged and rearranged to form different landscapes. Each time the panorama is exhibited, it evolves along with the growing and mutating archive, including a different selection and combination of images, as well as new images or even new categories, that may provoke a rereading of the entire collection.

The form of the publication stays close to the original Theatrum Orbis Terrarum reference. But though it covers all 114 categories of human gestures identified to date and invites the reader to ‘travel’ through the theatre of the human world, it includes only a selection of the images collected so far, organized in a temporary formation, as a moment of repose in an open and mutable process of understanding how we relate to our world.

List of Gestures, Westspace, Melbourne, AU (2015)

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Panorama)
The installation is always uniquely composed for each exhibition.
Materials: full-colour photo prints pasted onto the wall, list of gestures (text sticker)
Various Sizes.

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum
Published by IKON Gallery (Birmingham, UK)
and Spike Island (Bristol, UK), 2011

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (pdf. / 144 pages)

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2011) Photo Stuart Whipps.
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Comma, Bloomberg SPACE, London, UK (2009)
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, West Space, Melbourne, AU (2015)
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Berkeley Art Museum (BAM/PFA), US (2010)