Kaart van Afrika 1700 - 1735

Curator: This map just zings with a peculiar sense of the possible. There’s so much empty space around a familiar shape. What do you think? Editor: There's a delicacy to it that's unexpected. Given what we know now, it feels…naive in a way that almost amplifies its beauty. I find the empty space…telling, as if they imagined terrible and magnificent things in the gaps of their geographical understanding. Curator: Yes, exactly! That potential, that “what if,” feels powerfully present. Now, this "Kaart van Afrika," created anonymously between 1700 and 1735, combines drawing and print on paper with watercolour details. The anonymous creator captures a view of Africa filtered through the lens of orientalism. What cultural assumptions do you see embedded here? Editor: The very act of mapping presupposes a kind of knowing, a possession even, that speaks volumes. I'm also struck by the shields adorning the sides - visual cues suggesting sovereignty, borders both declared and imagined. Notice the tiny vignettes, the costumed figures and what appears to be an ocean-going ship on the upper right side. They tell the history, not of the space, but how Europe met the space, literally filling Africa with European tropes. The continent itself becomes a projection screen for anxieties and aspirations. Curator: The detail along the coasts especially gives me pause, suggesting bustling trade routes or imagined treasures awaiting extraction, very colonial! And this peculiar choice of watercolors brings softness and washes it all with a somewhat utopian tone. Editor: Exactly. Maps, for all their apparent objectivity, are such subjective mirrors reflecting both the known and, perhaps more revealingly, the unknown. Here it gives space for us to rethink old patterns of colonization, to remember there is always the hidden, to learn we do not know it all even when a picture seems whole. Curator: Looking at it this way brings it to a very poignant level. Let's hope that in our future, it will give all an encouragement toward a world of respect.