Installation (2008) Floor carpet 640 x 400 cm. Wall tapestry 585 x 305 cm. Video with text, 8 minutes. Soundtrack with field recordings of frogs and cicadas played at low volume. Created in collaboration with Ege Carpets for “Socle du Monde Biennial,” Herning Art Museum, 2008.

By studying the use of cartography in 18th century colonial administration, I am interested in how mapping and naming are used as methods to claiming land. While Joseph Conrad describes the areas to become colonized by western nations as “white spots on the map” these places had enormous economical impact in the colonial mother nations and yet at the same time they have once again become “blind spots” in our national memory.

The installation The Mapmaker contains a film as well as two tapestries. A floor carpet depicts the first Danish map drawn of St. Croix (1750), and an expedition photo from St. Croix (1911) is transformed into a panoramic wall tapestry. The film consists of a text, in which I reflect on the acts of mapping and naming as ways of occupying a space, as well as on how the routes of the colonizer to some extend are continued by the routes of the tourist today.

Text fragment from the video:

In the novel I am reading, the protagonist says:

“Now, when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look
for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself
in all the glories of exploration. At that time, there were many blank
spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly
inviting on a map, I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow
up, I will go there.’”

I am looking for the first map.

Two men, Johann Cronenberg and Johann von Jægersberg, made the
first Danish map of St. Croix.

In 1745, Lieutenant Cronenberg was sent to St. Croix to start the survey.
A few years later, Jægersberg was sent to assist him. In 1750,
Cronenberg was arrested and expelled from St. Croix for a relationship
with a married woman. Jægersberg finished the map and sent it
off to Denmark.

Three months later, he was dead.

Apparently, the map was outstanding. No other cartographic survey
from the period provided such detailed information. Nevertheless,
we do not know how the map was received in Copenhagen. It seems to
have disappeared after its arrival. Only decades later did it reappear in
the archives.