Drawing : Maps

Showing posts with label Maps. Show all posts

Saturday, 20 February 2021

Tiébélé in Burkina Faso

Occasionally in travel articles you see something that really makes you think. In this case it was a series of photographs taken by a photographer and diarist, Rita Willaert and Olga Stavrakis. I would normally dismiss these travel documentary images as yet another example of post colonial travel syndrome, people vicariously gazing into other peoples lives and in recording them making a good living from poor people living on the edge. It could well be that Willaert and Stavrakis are indeed voyeurs and that by poking their noses into a place where they don't belong they may have disturbed the equilibrium of a society that has managed to get on fine without Western interference. But even so, the images I saw really effected me and made me aware of how far we have come in our English towns from a close contact with the ground from which we have emerged.

Tiébélé lies nestled at the base of a hill, and is an African village which was first settled in the 15th Century. Belonging to the Kassena people, their chief, and royal court, this is the home of one of oldest ethnic groups in Burkina Faso. Digging a little further into their history I found that the Kassena peoples belong to a larger subset of peoples, the Gurunsi, that inhabit an area encompassing southern Burkina Faso and northern Ghana. The Gurunsi share common histories, languages, and political structures, but French and British colonial systems differed in their administrative practices, which means that a once united people are now separate. The lines drawn on maps by French and British administrators in the 19th century, still divide populations that had deep cultural connections and of course an affinity with and awareness of the land and its possibilities. It was at the Berlin Conference of 1884, that the European nations agreed upon their respective territorial claims and a border was agreed by mutual agreement between Britain and France on 14 June 1898 and a more precise border was then drawn up by an exchange of notes in 1904, and officially approved in 1906, a border that was later demarcated on the ground via a series of pillars.

Map of Ghana and Burkina Faso

Look at the line that divides the two territories, it looks as if for most of it's length someone simply placed a ruler on a map and drew a straight line. The contrast between the sharp gridded lines of longitude and latitude that divide up the map, and the organic lines of the Kassena peoples' adobe buildings couldn't be more stark, and they point to a fundamental difference in cultures. The Western nations had 'abstracted' themselves away from the world, mathematics and scientific thinking had allowed them to maintain a distance from reality and to believe that they could control things from a distance. The Kassena peoples were living in and as a part of their environment, therefore their constructions followed the contours of the land rather than cut into or through it.

These houses emerge from the ground organically, and are made of local clay, the walls are decorated with various colours of clay slip. The Tiébélé royal residence is made up of a series of small houses that are hand-painted in different geometric patterns and symbols using clay paints. These patterns are one of the visual indicators that differentiate the royal homes from that of the “ordinary people.” While most of the structures are homes, some of the most elaborately decorated are mausoleums, where the dead are laid to rest. The dead living amongst the village people even after death and recognised as an integral part of life.

An altar for animist worship

The fact that the village still has a working animist altar for ceremonies involving milk, feathers and animal blood, suggests that the people that live there still have a close spiritual relationship with their local environment. The recent stains of milk running down the sides of the altar, indicating that cows are still an important part of the local economy. Somehow these people have been able to continue living within a culture that still maintains aspects of pre-colonial traditions. The most visually striking being the powerful decorative surfaces that cover the village buildings. Their resilience is amazing and I would hope that rather than encourage some sort of tourism, that the message goes out about growing architecture out of the landscape rather than flattening it. The integration of people, architecture, and typologies of landscape with sensitive ecological effect is vital to all our futures and our ability to survive.

3D printed buildings made from mud: Mario Cucinella Architects (MC A) and WASP

The Green School in Bali

Earthship

What this post is also about is a reminder of the power of drawing. Lines drawn on a map of Africa divide a continent between Britain and France. When it was first realised that lines could be used to define a boundary, no one would have predicted that eventually this concept could be used to define the borders of artificially constructed countries. But it is also drawing that empowered the people of Tiébélé in the decoration of their buildings and artefacts. These buildings covered in zigzags and squares, communicate both the sheer joy of making lines and shapes over surfaces, as well as an awareness that these lines mark out differences between the homes of the living and the dead. But drawing can also be a tool that allows us to visualise new futures, the organic structural forms now possible for architects and engineers to use because of the power of computing, are only made visible to us through technical drawings. Drawing allows us to have powerful visions, sometimes so powerful that it would seem that humans have lost contact with the effects of that vision.

Technical drawing of the atom bomb

Drawings of the Nazca people

Nazca lines were made over 2,000 years ago and are most likely connected to water worship. The Peruvian archeologist John Isla points to the Nazca people’s intricate irrigation systems as evidence that these desert-dwellers had developed an intimate and worshipful relationship with water; their sophisticated aqueducts and spiral shaped wells still operating today. Nazca society developed around 200 B.C. alongside a river basin that allowed them to grow cotton, beans and corn. The Nazca River, which often flows underground, springs up at the foot of the remains of an important temple and shells from the coast of northern Peru are found at the sites of ceremonial altars in the mountains. I once read that the indigenous peoples of America visualised thought as 'crystallised air', their relationship with their environment being such that they were inseparable from it. We forget that we 'swim' in air as fish swim in water and that without it we would die; the drawn lines of the Nazca are it would seem a way to 'talk' with the sky. In the 1940s in the USA the Office of Scientific Research and Development, forged an unprecedented alliance between government, academia and industry, to shape a different idea that also emerged in a desert environment, an idea that reminded Robert Oppenheimer at the time of a piece of Hindu scripture; “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

Monday, 15 February 2021

The Triangle

The Delta Glyph

The triangle, in the Greek alphabet is called the delta glyph. It has often been regarded as being symbolic of a doorway, but before the Greeks used it in their alphabet, it had been drawn on cave walls across many cultures and times. It is an entoptic shape, something generated by the brain and as such it belongs to human beings just as much as their arms and legs and stomachs.

Amesbury Archer arrowhead from Stonehenge

Many of the early triangle representations do look very like arrowheads, so it is hard to decide whether they are drawings of things that would have been around all the time, or whether that is simply a coincidence. However, these basic early forms do occur right across the world.

The distribution of early symbols

The tri-angle is of course a representation of three lines coming together. It can be used to draw an arrowhead and the arrowhead in its turn has sometimes disengaged itself from the shaft of the arrow to become a stand alone directional symbol.

Contemporary directional arrowheads

The triangle combined with three arrowheads is of course now used as a recycling symbol, which is a sort of multiplication of triangular effect.

Recycling symbol

The triangle has been used by many cultures and faiths as well as different societies to symbolise a wide variety of ideas and concepts.

Triangles can be used to direct energy and power in the direction which they point. If however it is an equilateral triangle, a decision as to which line forms a base, will often depend on context.

In alchemy, the triangle represents the three realms of human existence; the body, the mind and the spirit/soul. The triangle providing four symbolic representations of the basic alchemical elements.

Fire – 🜂

Water – 🜄

Air – 🜁

Earth – 🜃

It can be rewarding to play around with numbers

In caves the world over the basic abstract forms that we have been looking at reoccur again and again. I have referred to them before as entoptic forms, but there are other explanations.

The prehistorian Henri Breuil, decided that the abstract symbols were representations of traps and weapons, linking the shapes to the animals depicted next to them. The French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan read the lines and hook shapes he found as male symbols, and ovals and triangles as female symbols.

Representation of the vulva?

However reading inverted triangles as representations of the vulva, could be the result of gender bias in interpretation. “It’s interesting that it was predominantly male archaeologists doing this work early on, and there were a whole lot of vulvas being identified everywhere. This could have been a product of the times, but then again, many cultures do place importance on fertility,” stated a more contemporary researcher, Genevieve von Petzinger. The general consensus in the books on symbolism is when pointing up, triangles represent stability and power, when pointing down they become unstable. The up-pointing triangle is often seen as a masculine shape, but when inverted it represents the feminine. Perhaps this juxtaposition needs amended though, it tends to suggest an association of masculine strength and female instability. It would have been more interesting if it was power v balance. The balancing of all that mass on a fine point being far more difficult than resting on a fat base. In spirituality, triangles represent the union of body, mind, and spirit, and in the Christian religion, God the father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost. Once again we have a great many uses for a simple shape.

It was the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams who proposed a neuropsychological interpretation for these symbols. It was argued that they were triggered in the darkness of caves during hallucinogenic experiences that were part of shamanic rituals. These symbols being literal representations of hallucinations which were themselves visions of entoptic forms. As someone that gets severe migraines, I see linear and triangular forms drift across my field of vision when my migraines are at their worst, and the drawings I have made of them are not unlike those found on cave walls. Triangles can also be thought of as 'geons', simple 2D or 3D forms, (a cone is the 3D form of a triangle) that can be used to build up more complex forms.

Number 1 could easily be a boy's head with a dunces cap on and number 2 could be an ice cream in a cone.

With the advent of computer graphics geons are becoming more important. In computer aided design 3D shape representation is often made by approximating the shapes of object parts by a set of prescribed volumetric models called parametric geons. Something that is actually not that new, as I remember having students draw as many variations as possible of combinations of cubes, cylinders, cones and spheres, as a 3D design exercise when working on foundation back in the 1970s. In fact it takes me back to the time I was working as a draftsman at Round Oak Steel Works. Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) is a language of symbols and standards designed and used by engineers and manufacturers to describe a product and facilitate communication between groups of people and machines working together to produce something. GD&T statements are essential to this, and they make sure that in making drawings for manufacture that all dimensions must have a tolerance. Every feature on every manufactured part is subject to variation, therefore, the limits of allowable variation must be specified. However what geons reminded me of was that there are 14 GD&T symbols and they are very like the basic forms we have been looking at. The symbol for angularity is basically another arrowhead.

If you ever come across a feature control frame you will now know what it refers to. This is yet another example of those codes that have by necessity become fixed, such as the highway code. The white lines, yellow lines, dashed lines and arrows that are part of our highways' visual texture, are as fixed in their interpretation as the letter A (another arrowhead) in English standing for the sound 'ei'.

The letters IPA set out in the International Phonetic Alphabet

The reason I know that the letter 'A' is pronounced 'ei' is because of another set of standards set out as a code. The International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA which of course has yet another set of guidelines, its own highway code.

Guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet

Typical map legend

We see these code translations on inserts in every map we open, in some cases our arrow/triangle will now become a campsite, in others a survey marker.

But it is also at the root of all our troubles, the triangular form that is in the centre of the larynx or the voice box is what makes us human, without it we would be something completely different.

Canova's tomb

The larynx image instigates an idea that the spoken word is perhaps the beginning of the end for human kind. When I hear contemporary political debate it feels as if oratory has lost all reason and that language is dying. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it became fashionable to view art galleries at night by torchlight. This meant that sculpture became subservient to the shadow, and Canova was an artist who was seduced by those shadows, smoothing out his marble surfaces until all life had been polished away. The language of sculpture at that time was dying too.

There are times when I yearn for a set of standards whereby there could be no more than one interpretation for something I have drawn. So as my mind wanders off in another direction perhaps I'll leave you with a few images with titles (code translations) just as a test to see whether as images they are in any way anchored in their interpretation by text juxtapositions.

Fear of failure

Deep sleep

Incontinence

Friday, 21 August 2015

Venice Biennale part 3

Tiffany Chung

Diagrams and maps can be powerful formats when it comes to explaining an idea. In particular by changing just one element in something, a contradiction or questioning process can be inserted into an image. Tiffany Chung works using tracing papers and mapping procedures. Deceptively simple work that is very powerful in its effect. At first sight it appears as very pleasantly decorative. Small dots and circles of colour are marshalled across the milky surface of the tracing paper. It is only after looking at the titles that you begin to realise what you are looking at. These are maps of changing territories, territories that are moving because of ongoing war. In particular the war in Syria results in a constant taking and retaking of positions. Boundaries between states and peoples are of course set by arbitrary means and if you go far enough back in time, you will usually find that it was an act of aggression that was the defining moment in the setting of a nation's boundaries.

The information provided in the information plate both identifies each work and details the issues dealt with. This way of hanging suggests the random nature of aggression and the unpredictability of these dangerous situations. In particular I remembered the note, 'Numbers of children killed', a simple line of text that referred to a set of traumatic events that I couldn't bare thinking about. What if one of those children had been my daughter or my son? These maps are connected to real events, but by the time we see the map, in the news these events have moved on, they in some ways no longer exist. But in the hearts and minds of those who experience war, the trauma is never forgotten and the pain will at some moment in the future need to be exorcised.

Tiffany Chung is from Vietnam, she makes cartographic drawings, sculptures, videos, photographs, and theatre performances that explore spatial and sociopolitical transformations interwoven with her responses to political and historical trauma.

Chung uses map conventions and Maja Bajevic uses the diagram to carry her ideas. Using graphs of rising and falling commodity prices, Bajevic creates images with old craft techniques such as weaving and embroidery. The two would appear to have nothing in common, but the conjunction between an old craft and contemporary graphic measuring techniques reminds us of how all data is in fact reliant on the rough imprecise nature of reality. The highs and lows of the stock exchange can appear to be an abstract, almost inhuman process, but a handmade, woven artefact will always retain the trace of its human maker.

Maja Bajevic

The short biography in the catalogue states: 'Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Maja Bajevic lives and works in Paris. Using a range of media including video, light, installation, photography and performance, Bajevic's work reflects on social and political issues. Her video “Double Bubble” (2001) explores the concept of religious ideal, contrasting the values preached by organized religions with crimes committed “in the name of God”. Bajevic’s sound installation “Avanti Popolo” (2002-2005) is composed of patriotic songs from 30 different countries. Immersing the viewer in a cacophonic sound-scape, the work questions the paradoxical nature of anthems, which enhance a sense of collective belonging while also lending themselves to ideological designs'.

Arts, crafts and facts

Bajevic continues to explore the political uncertainties we all face due to the various ways that power is exercised in contemporary societies. In the case above there is a powerful contrast illustrated between worker productivity and company profits. As always for myself what interesting pieces of work do is illustrate a point whilst at the same time somehow bringing the idea back into some sort of individual reality. The embroidered text, the patterned cloth and the woven chart, combine to suggest that no matter how 'homely' or 'homespun' a situation might feel, outside the cottage door, somewhere off in the distance, the wheels of industry and commerce will grind on, and whether you like it or not, at some point your life will be shaped by some faceless manager, sitting over a collection of bar charts, and deciding on how to make a better profit.