Find the dragons, beasts and monsters.
Collect the fear, the foreign and the unknown.
Map the permanence and impermanence.
I bought a map when I first came to Germany to help me get from A to B. With time the points where the folds meet began to get worn, until small holes grew unnoticed between co-ordinates. Soon a network will run along the folds, linking together these spaces. We will be able to travel along the cracks in complete absence.
Here be dragons is a journey to the holes and cracks that quietly form along the folds of a well used map, escaping into spaces that in this particular context have ceased to exist. If we consider the number of maps in circulation we can assume that these expanding holes can be found in various sizes at almost every location.
An urban legend claims that early cartographers labeled lands that had not been mapped or documented with the phrase ‘Here be dragons’. In reality this sentence has only been found on the Lennox Globe (ca. 1503-7), although early cartographers were known to draw fantastic and fearful beasts in remote unexplored corners of the world.
Using a worn and weathered maps of the local area we will set out to document these ‘holes’, searching for the monsters and dragons that lurk within these disappearing territories, exploring the fear and exclusion of the unknown or foreign and how shifting communities and cultures are infiltrating previously ‘mapped’ situations. A fluid landscape requiring fluid thought processes.
Our (potentially mis-informing) acts of journalism will become part of a growing archive, a museum of found objects, texts and photographic documentation.
Feel free to conduct this experiment in other cities and following new directions or methodologies. Let me know how things go!