I met Anna Weber at the Danish GeoForum’s KortDage event.
She had asked delegates to bring with them a soil sample from their home region, she had over 40 samples from Denmark and as she was keen to tell me one from Sweden. She then made this Earth Map of Denmark.
Is it a map? I don’t know but it was beautiful and if a conference of 800 map geeks thought this was a worthwhile project to give space to, who am I to argue?
She explains the process in this short video clip
Update!
Anna sent me this additional info on her artwork:
Itinerant Cartography // Vandrende Kartografi, 2018
Artwork by Anna Weber Henriksen
Www.annaweberhenriksen.dkWith this landscape dialogue, images are extracted directly from the earth. 42 different sites from Denmark was connected at Kortdage 2018, and combined the sites created a new map and landscape-painting of the earth’s color and texture. The process here allows the composition of the land differently, moving cities and borders, and we can observe a new staging of the landscape, freed from its cadastral and economic value.
A starting point for this work is the artists interest in how mapping the globe with classifications, data collection and technological perfection affects the way we look and sense our surroundings. We all know the current mapping with socio-economic interests that always have a specific goal: where are the best agricultural land, where can the highway be located, where should the drinking water be protected, which building sites are the most expensive, where is the pollution worst, where does the refugees move? Everything can be mapped – both visible and invisible elements. But what about the earth in itself? Can it be mapped without the aim of a readable facit, classification or control-system?
The 42 sites, was collected by the participants at Kortdage 2018, and the work was a collective process unfolding throughout the geodata conference, as an open studio.
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