Nepthys Zwer, Philippe RekacewiczCartographie radicale : explorations

“There are cards that say no. Radical maps that reveal and denounce, that protest. To understand these rebel maps, how they work, their strengths, their possibilities, this book undertakes a journey of exploration to the heart of cartographic creation. What exactly happens when we create a map, whether it is radical, experimental (also called critical cartography or counter-mapping) or conventional? What are the intentions behind its making and implementation?

The first function of maps is to help us find our way in space and move from one point to another. They allow ships to navigate and planes to fly. With maps, we make war, then eventually peace. They are also formidable dream machines, shaping our image of the world, fixing the memory of it and eventually making our reality. What motivates this very particular act of symbolic shaping of the world, from Strabo to the anarchist Elisée Reclus, from the Benedictine Hildegard von Bingen to the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, from portulans to the staff map? What part of creative fantasy, what part of Faustian fantasy of a possible mastery of our environment, what part of scientific sincerity are at work?

Between the emergence of the daring thematic cartography of the engineer Charles-Joseph Minard, or that of the information designers Otto and Marie Neurath, and the conceptual semiological approach of Jacques Bertin, lies a point of rupture with the conventions of cartographic representation. A liberating point that opened the field of experimentation and made the democratization of maps possible.”