When Worlds Collide

March 3, 2024 9:27 AM

Mexica, Mercedes, and Indigenous Voices in Maps "There’s a popular poster of the world composed of satellite images, with continents arrayed horizontally like the Mercator wall map we knew in grade school. [ . . . ] consider the choice to view the world from such a distance, without borders or place names, where green, brown, deep blue and icy white surely obscure all traces of civilization, along with the harm humans have done."
posted by Blue Genie (1 comment total)

Thanks so much for posting this! I really love the contemporary artists' reimaginings of maps.

Filled with Mesoamerican iconography, [Sandy] Rodriguez’s works confront the viewer with police violence and the incarceration of Latino immigrants. Her painting, De las Señales y Pronósticos and I.C.E. Raids de Califas (Of the Signs and Prophecies and I.C.E. Raids in California [slang]), presents a map of the state, with satellite views of detention centers plotted onto the desert borderlands. Rodriguez explains that her colors and style reference images of the Conquest in the Florentine Codex.

posted by spamandkimchi at 9:22 PM on March 3