The exhibition « Le monde enchanté de Jacques Demy« which takes place from April 10 to August 8, 2013 at the Cinemathèque française in Paris, offers the opportunity to see closely the world of cities of this French filmmaker, who died in 1990. Jacques Demy, close to the « Nouvelle vague« , was a producer, but also a screenwriter,…
The exhibition « Macchiaoli 1850-1874. Italian impressionist? » which held at the Orangerie Museum in Paris from 10 April to 22 July 2013, offers to see the influence that some representatives of this Italian art movement had on filmmakers, especially for the representation of landscapes. The pictorial movement Macchioioli developed in Florence during the second half of…
The Cubic site has relayed the announcement by Google that Hashima (or « Battleship ») Island is now visible on GoogleStreetView. The Hashima island is an old mine in the Japanese archipelago, located off Nagasaki, which was abandoned in 1974. Since that time no regular human activity takes place there. However the island has served as decor…
Here is an exhibition of Centre Pompidou in Metz which seems specially designed for (e)space&fiction. Views from above considers how an elevated perspective, from aerial photographs or satellite images, has transformed artists’ perception of the world since the mid-nineteenth century. A gold mine of images and ideas we have to visit later in details. L’exposition…
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), pioneer of abstract painting, is not in theory an artist inclined to evoke real places in his works. Since 1913 and the discovery of cubism in Paris, Mondrian has made it a goal to find out a visual language for reporting the abstract reality behind the natural one and looking for the…
On April 27 was held at the BnF a conference entitled « Drift and psychogeography » which took place in the framework of the exhibition « Guy Debord. Un art de la guerrer » which takes place from 27 March to 13 July 2013 in Grande Galerie at the BNF (François Mitterrand Site). This conference was given by Emmanuel…
We present here two recent French projects of cultural mapping. The first is developed by the association of libraries of the Ville de Paris. The second named Géoculture, a very ambitious cultural Web and mobile service with a mapping tool that aim to give access to the cultural works of a region. . Les initiatives…
Wolf Vostell is an eminent German artist, died in 1998 and considered as a pioneer of the Fluxus movement who questioned categories of the art and rejected institutions and the idea of art work itself. One of his works, realized in 1980, integrates a map of Berlin area. Wolf Vostell est un éminent artiste allemand, mort…
Art and Geography – Aesthetics and practices of spatial knowledges conference takes place in Lyon (France) from the 11 to 13 Feb 2013. It offers a very rich program of communications and art performances. Le colloque Art et Géographie – Esthétiques et pratiques des savoirs spatiaux a lieu à Lyon du 11 au 13 févr. 2013…
The big Grand Palais Hopper’s exhibition in Paris is closing tonight. It is an opportunity to publish a post somewhere between news, spatial machinery and materialization of fiction. The New-York Time magazine published in July 2012 – and le Monde in September 2012- wrote about the work of the photographer Gail Albert Halaban. In this…
This famous drawing titled New Yorker map of the World is from Saul Steinberg. The New Yorker published it on its cover on March 29, 1976. It is often seen as a satire of the New Yorkers’ « smug provincialism ». Actually, it is a beautiful and satiric expression of a much more general mental geography. People…
In 1994 and 1995, the artist and engraver Marc Jurt and the writer Michel Butor initiated an artistic collaboration inspired by maps; all kind of maps : city maps or aerial photographs, world maps or topographic maps, aeronautical maps or meteorological maps. Marc Jurt started with geographical documents and juxtaposed or superimposed engravings or paintings…
On (e)space and fiction we already have written about tattoos (Prison Break, Waterworld). But we present here a non fictional example. The Long March was a military retreat undertaken by the Red Army of the Communist Party of China to escape Tchang Kaï-chek’s Kuomintang army, during the Chinese Civil war. From 2002 to 2005, 250…
Matthiew Cusick is an American artist born in New York in 1970 and currently working in Dallas. Among other techniques he uses acrylic with inlaid map fragments from different kinds : school atlases, topographic maps or road maps. He also simply sticks maps as overlaid layers. He composes beautiful landscapes viewed from above or at…
Those who have seen Une chambre en ville the movie by Jacques Demy (1982) probably remember the creepy televisions shop run by the scary Edmond Leroyer (Michel Piccoli), jealous and crazy husband of the beautiful Edith (Dominique Sanda). As part of Le voyage à Nantes, artistic event held in Nantes from 15 June to 18…
La Croix and many other newspapers mentioned the discovery that the copy of the Mona Lisa in the Prado Museum in Madrid is older than it was previously thought and was painted in Da Vinci’s workshop itself. It appears the painting is contemporary with the original,and could be a preparatory study for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.…
The dark lens series of the photographer Cédric Delseau (a book at Editions Xavier Barral) is an artistic kind of materialization of fiction. The photographer takes pictures in contemporary urban sites of different countries (France, Dubai …) and add them characters and spaceships from the movie Star Warsby George Lukas. This is not just a collage…
Yoda is THE Jedi Grand Master in Georges Lucas’s epic space opera: Star Wars. He appears in 5 of the 6 movies (I, II, III, V et VI). He materializes mainly in two places of the real world. Yoda est LE grand maître Jedi du space-opera Star Wars imaginé et réalisé par Georges Lucas. Il…
Gordon Matta-Clark was a conceptual artist from the downtown New-York art scene during the 1970s whose work focused on the physical changes affecting New-York during the post-war decades. His work Real Properties : Fake Estates (RPFE) (1973-1974) documents some of these changes and their consequences on the urban fabric of the city. The course of…
On the occasion of the 25th International Cartographic Conference, an Art & cartography exhibit will take place in Saint-Mandé (near Paris). Under the title « Artists visit again the representation of the world the exhibit gathers several artists : Michel Granger, Hervé Baudry, Ghislaine Escande, Philippe Favier, Michel Guéranger, Jean-Michel Hequet Vudici, Emma Malig, David Renaud, Nathalie…
Creative mapping is a blog dedicated to the creative use of maps in art or how to map information creatively. Creative mapping est un blog dédié à l’utilisation créative des cartes dans l’art ou à la manière de cartographier l’information de façon créative.
The Italian movies of 50s, 60s and 70s invented a new way to depict geography of Italy after second world war, especially urban landscapes. By describing what was supposed to become the geography of the new Italy, as well as its new architecture, urbanism and land planning, the Italian filmmakers wanted to show future face…
At the last minute, an invitation to the exhibition Le monde physique (The Physical World) featuring works inspired by geological and climatological data and maps at the La Galerie Contemporary Art Center in Noisy-le-Sec. Please note that it ends on Saturday, April 23. In extremis, une invitation pour l’exposition Le monde physique avec des œuvres …
Duane Hanson ( 1925-1996 ) is an American sculptor known for the realistic and life-sized works of people he created with various materials (polyester resin, fiberglass, bronze, Bondo). His work is associated with hyperrealism and Pop Art movement. One of these works, Tourists, represents a couple of tourists, caricatures of the stereotypical American tourists. In…
Elective Affinities (1996) is a movie directed by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani based on the novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Edouard (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and Charlotte (Isabelle Huppert), a couple of aristocrats, invited a childhood friend of Edouard (Fabrizio Bentivoglio) to join them in their villa in Tuscany. This friend is an architect. In the…
Created in collaboration between Yona Friedman, a theoretician of architecture and Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, a photographer and a videographer, this exhibition transposed the fictitious geography of an island situated in the far north of Canada to the middle of the Lake of Vassivière in Limousin. Visitors were invited to discover the mapping of the imaginary Balkis…
The Little Prince created by Saint-Exupery has become a universal character. Translated into more than 200 languages, the poetic and philosophical tale written by the French aviator touches the hearts of people all around the world. Were you aware he left his planet to materialize on the Earth ? Do you want to know where and…
The stairs in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art are very famous as the training ground of Rocky Balboa, in the 1976 movie Rocky, directed by John G. Avildsen. The stairs appear successively in Rocky II (directed by Sylverster Stallone in 1979), Rocky III (Sylverster Stallone, 1985), Rocky V (John G. Avildsen, 1990) and…
Shannon Rankin is an American artist born 1971 in California who lives and works presently in Rangeley, Maine, USA. She created several series of artworks with maps as raw material, maps she cuts, disintegrates, sticks, connects with threads, pins… As she writes on her homepage: « I deconstruct maps to create new geographies, suggesting the potential…
Everybody knows or thinks he knows Mona Lisa, the most famous painting in the world. But it is also a mysterious work that has given rise to many rumors and speculations. We propose here an original interpretation that considers the painting as a sophisticated spatial and cartographic arrangement. We first build our reasoning upon an…
(e)space & fiction 