Mapping, Collecting and Archiving (2008)

Marjolijn Dijkman interviewed by Annette Schemmel

Mapping, Collecting and Archiving was published in 'Decollecting'

Decollecting
publisher: FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais
Editor: Annette Schemmel
ISBN: 978-3-86560-425-5 / 978-2 912345-17-2

AS: Your project is called “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum”. Could you talk more about this work?

MD: Maybe I should just show you some pictures.... This one is probably the first maps they have discovered, in Ukraine, 12,000 years ago. It’s a description of a village. It’s very very small, but it’s the first handheld map of the surroundings. In a way it’s really nice how people make abstractions of the world around them in order to get an understanding of where they are, to find their way, or to comprehend the space around them. So, mapping is something I find really interesting. And I also have always found the whole idea of the explorer fascinating. Already in childhood I wanted to travel a lot, to see a lot of places in the world. But then, as you get a little bit older, you realise: “I am not the only one; there were a lot of people before me, who started out with similiar ideas.” And when they arrived somewhere, of course, a lot of really bad things happened, like the first moments of conflict between the cultures. Good things came out of it, as well, like exchange, efforts to understand each other, and the mapping the world. “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum” was the first atlas made in 1570, and it was made possible by all these explorers.

AS: How was the knowledge from these various explorers compiled?

MD: Ortelius collected all the maps from these explorers. He travelled a bit inside Europe, and he bought a lot of maps and collected all these drawings, as well. He was the first one, not only to collect all these individual pieces, but to put them all together, creating a bigger picture. And he called this bigger picture “theatre,” because there was still a lot of imagination involved. Things were unknown. His “theatre” was a kind of spectacle of the world. This notion still captures my imagination, even though we are living in a time when everything is mapped. We have Google Earth, Flickr connected to Google Earth, Street Google, we can look at everything! But at the same time, you don’t get your picture, the things you want to see. For me, there’s still a lot more to explore.

Take this image for instance: (www.woophy.com) this is a Rotterdam initiative, one of the first photo blogs that superimposes images onto the location where they were taken. It’s mostly amateur, tourist photos of places, where tourists are supposed to be. And when you compare this map to former colonisation maps, they show amongst others similarities in the way tourists also occupy the coastlines of countries and how some parts of the world will never get the main attention.

Map of former Dutch Colonies (source Wikipedia)

AS: What was the purpose of this project for you? What did they expect from it?

MD: I think they wanted to show an image of the world made by [amateur] photographers. So that you could really click on the village or the place, where you come from or where you want to go, and you can see how it looks there. It is very practical. And it’s combining travel photography with a bigger collection. Everybody can work on it collectively, like Flickr and all these photo archives online. Together, a lot of people are contributing to a bigger picture. But, sometimes I have my doubts about who is behind this bigger picture. As an individual you’re part of something bigger, but who was thinking about the framework for this big picture? What does it actually mean? What are you contributing to?

It’s also about control. As always when you collect data, it can be used in the wrong way. It has happened a lot. In the Netherlands, for instance, we had one of the most sophisticated mapping systems in Europe during WWII it was very easy to track down the Jews of Amsterdam, because they were all categorised. Collecting data for functional and political reasons is something I would like to challenge with a different system.

AS: This leads us to your own photo collections. How do they function?

MD: I am very fascinated by the Enlightenment concept of the collector: Collecting as much knowledge as possible. But I realised that the more I travel, the more I see similarities and not many differences between places. Or, maybe I actually see the differences, but within the similarities.
Generally, one is taking pictures of a specific place and thinking that those images will tell you everything. But taking pictures is not just rational: often it’s disturbed by emotions or by longing for other places, thinking it’s better there.... So, the more pictures I took, the more I realised that it’s just not relevant for me to put pictures in different folders, like Milan, Rome, Moscow.... I mixed them up, but then I got lost. At the Jan van Eyck Academie I started to figure it out. For the past few years, my practice has focused on intervention, and I have developed installations and spatial works. So, a lot of my images have to do with space, and how people treat space, and how people treat nature or each other, and how they deal with living together. After a while I came to the idea for the first part of my “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,” called “Gestures.” I listed all the verbs for the gestures people make. And the more categories I made, the more I realised how personal they were, a sort of mapping my own interpretation of the things around myself. Not only am I saying that people do this and this and this, like an anthropologist, but the research is also very personal, exploring what I recognise as a gesture.

There are quite general gestures, like “display,” “collect,” or “announce,” and everyone kind of knows what you’re talking about in relation to your surroundings. But “turn pale,” “suffocate,” or “oppress” are more emotional and expressive gestures, which are perhaps not so obvious. And it’s a very important part of this archive that you can work with the expression of the respective place, with the things that I see as the actors of the “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.” They’re acting; they’re expressing something with which you as a viewer can empathise. Then, by recognising the gesture, you join in this theatre. But if you don’t recognise the gesture, you won't be touched by it I guess.

AS: What kind of spaces are most interest you?

MD: The first part [“Gestures”] contains mostly pictures taken in public space, because it has a lot to do with walking around, without a real purpose, but just looking...

AS: The flâneur...

MD: Yeah, it’s a bit like the flâneur. Sometimes I enter buildings - often I am immediately kicked out - so many images are taken outside. But many of the images for the other two parts, for “References” and “Speculations,” were taken inside. “Speculations” is dealing with spaces that contain a certain time, sort of time capsules. And often they’re taken inside, so they have a certain temperature and a certain climate in order to maintain that atmoshpere. In public space, things quickly become run down and loose this moment in time.

The third part, “References,” is both inside and outside, since it deals with places that are referring to one another - far away places by their design, exterior or interior.

AS: You decided to publish your archive on the Internet, which is, of course, itself a very specific space. There are tons of “internet museums” set up by people for their private collections. They’re made for a larger public and interested people find them via respective tagging. What role does the Internet play as a platform for your archive?

MD: I always try to make works in the “public sphere,” because I am interested in the idea of making things easy to enter, even if one enters them without realising it. Within institutional spaces, you’re watched, and you’re controlled. In contrast, the Internet and “public space” – as far as you can speak of a “public” space in the sense of common space, the space we share with others – can be appropriated for a while, and nobody notices. I like that.

I was working on this archive for two, three years privately, and I was wondering how to present it. Now I have found a few ways to present it in exhibitions. But, since it’s a worldwide research project, making it accessible to a larger audience, rather than locating it in one space (like the archives of the Mundaneum or the Aby Warburg Institute), makes sense.

AS: In the early 20th century, Paul Otlet, the Mundaneum’s founder, dreamt of the kind of thing you’re doing now. He thought he could come up with a technical solution that would make his archives accessible around the world, the “Image Phone.”

MD: It’s about sharing.

AS: Apropos sharing: Could you imagine opening up your archives to contributions from other people? How important is it for you that it contains only your own imagery?

MD: I thought about this a lot. I went to the Center of Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. They work with a lot of photographers in their archive. When I was at the Aby Warburg Institute I spoke to the curator for the photographic collection. He explained the system and the way the current researchers are trying to actualise it. I asked him what the archive would it look like if they removed all the information from these categories and catalogued it again from the beginning. After a while he said, “I think it would look the same.” So, this system has become an institution and a kind of dogma and a truth! Therefore I think if you involve people in your archives, like Whoophy [the mapping collective mentioned above] does it, you become a system and an institution yourself. And it becomes so difficult to change and to say: Now we’ll do it all differently! Since my archive is so personal and also so much about my way of looking and experiencing, I think it is something individual. I should create it myself. And if people would like to make their own archive, they can. They can make their own archive, they can use mine, even copy my whole website - I wouldn’t mind that. But I think it is really important to keep it personal. It is not about creating “the truth.”

Check for more information the online publication Theatrum Orbis Terrarum