The map is more interesting than the territory
Michel Houellebecq
It all starts with the rarified whitish blue filling the entire screen. Is it a monochrome pattern? A fragment of the painting, or something from the real world? The faraway sounds – sea waves mixed with the city noises – suggest the latter while the movement of the camera begins. It will be a really long vertical take; as if someone placed the camera in a transparent lift and took a ride from the top sky level to the bottom ground in a rather unhurried way. Various levels gradually unveil; the sky, the sea, the roofs of the buildings, their walls, the street with cars, the palm tree close-up, complete darkness, and finally the ground floor. The camera stops inside of the building in an empty room where the light gets inside through the barred window and plays on bricked walls. From there, there will be no more vertical takes, only horizontal.
The dominating composition of Sketch for the Last Map is based on overlapping translucent frames of indoor and outdoor spaces presented in slow and aloof, almost technical camera takes. The presented interiors are often without people; empty restaurants, empty hotels, empty bourgeois rooms, empty schools, empty museums, and empty religious cult places. Those various abandoned interiors are mixed with the second layer, often a farther away perspective of the street or the city thus blurring what one is looking at. And while shots for the movie were taken in several ‘real’ cities in Belgium, South Korea, India, France, Turkey, and Uruguay, such double composition makes them completely placeless, or more it feels like the images could have been produced by the computer program. Yet, at the same time, the background minimalistic bell sound and slow almost meditative rhythm of the changing images bring about a sacral atmosphere. However, it is not the place that is sacred here, it is the technology.
Sketch for the Last Map captures accurately our digitalized everyday life experience which blurs and redefines relations between how we perceive images and reality. This experience is especially stupefying when one thinks about places and their maps; how we think about them and how we use them. In the pre-technology world, the traditional maps were not transparent, nor innocent documents; the forms they took revealed not only specific data but also a given discourse on how space was understood. Maps have never shown objective knowledge or truths but were an effect of producing and reproducing visions of power and borders – either real or imaginative. Contemporary technology adds another layer; the actual physical places are almost always pre-experienced or intermediated in real-time through the digital image and data analysis of the screen. While it is more difficult to get lost having always your position defined on the cell phone, I’m not sure what could be possibly found either. Perhaps contemporary places or the contemporary neoliberal world as such is not made for vagabonds wandering around cities with no particular aim, but for wealthy tourists moving in precisely planned paths – as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman noticed a while ago. Or maybe the map is more interesting than the territory? What is unquestionable is that a certain way of experiencing and imagining places gets lost.
*This text is about the video by Lauri Astala Sketch for the Last Map (12min 50sec, 2022), which was one of the works presented at the Mänttä Art Festival 2022.
Sofia Ciel from Norway visited Helsinki and Mänttä in August 2022 for critics residency by Shine on Critique!