Drawing to capture the mind

Understanding and representing our environment is a universal need that humanity has tried to fulfill throughout the centuries. In CaixaForum Barcelona a great number of contemporary artists show, since July 25^th and until October 28^th, a different use of the cartographic language, in order to alter the ways in which reality is usually depicted, as a means to offer new alternatives that question the very impossibility of apprehending an ever growing and more chaotic world.

Michael Druks Druksland–Physical and Socia, 15 January 1974, 11.30 am 1974 © Michael Druks

Rise and fall of cartography

During the 17th century drawings and plans slowly began to include classifications of phenomena and events, thus making possible, with the combination of data and statistics, the progress of knowledge; over the next century, after the expansion of colonialism, a more scientific cartography will develop rapidly. 

In the 20th century, however, the possibility of capturing reality to its detail with the help of photography and video seems to give little chance to subjective vision, and so artists will fight this so-called “space crisis” to give birth to the Cubism movement, challenging again the way in which the world is captured.

Maps of Palestina 2009-2010 © R. Hamilton.

After the arrival of the Internet, traditional concepts such as time and space need to be redefined, as we live in an immaterial and expanding reality interlaced with endless flows of feelings and thoughts. This exhibition, commissioned by Helena Tatay, proposes a comparison between cartographies elaborated over the past century and those made barely a few years later, as a way to help us reflect on the systems we use to represent our world and the concepts and ideas lying underneath: mental maps, works of the Situationists or cartographies of power, from Lewis Carroll to Perejaume, Guy Debord or Paul Klee, among many others. All in all, an intense and formidable experience guaranteed to make us meditate on our comprehension of reality.