Seeking My Private Atlantis
By Zhanna Veyts
You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination By Katherine Harmon / Princeton Architectural Press, New York
Somewhere in the depths of the closet of my childhood room there’s a fading blue poster board titled, with curvy yellowing letters, "My Island of Treasure". It’s a project from fifth grade, a map of my childhood utopia, speckled with gold coins, populated by evergreen trees and little brown tents. There are roads for horses and swings for kids, and everyone walks around my island with a red balloon. I remember this as my favorite grade school project because this map set me on a journey beyond geography, a quest for my private Atlantis.
Maps can range from the limiting to the limitless. Every map represents a voyage and connotes an adventure, real or imaginary. What is more, maps reflect our understanding of our place in the world, but often tracking our movement to spaces far beyond. Though not a cartographer by trade or a map collector by hobby, Kathrine Harmon brings together a remarkable assembly of maps from a slew of disciplines into the fantastical volume, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination.
The book is a beautifully illustrated atlas of the imagination. Its contents track the mysterious (Italo Calvino’s "Invisible Cities" is charted on the Amazon), the routine (a postal worker marks his daily route through the neighborhood) and the essential ("The Great Bear," or the Underground in London). The structure of the book is a journey in itself, directing the reader from personal geographies, to ideas of the "home in the world" and finally into realms of fantasy.
In the first chapter Harmon strides to expand our conceptions of what is a map. She juxtaposes a Bedolina petroglyph from 2500 B.C., Guillermo Kuitca’s Untitled work from 1990, and Avery Fulford’s Maps of Three-Year-Old’s World; the three images share a remarkable Gestalt likeness What is more, they raise the inevitable question: Are maps an existential tool for us to deal with our place in the world? Writer Bridget Booher, in her surprisingly intimate work, Body Map of My Life adds another layer to the inquiry, by suggesting that we map the effects of time (and life events) upon the physical spaces of our bodies. After reading her whimsical account, I began to wonder how I might chart my personal geography by connecting all of the freckles, hangnails, scars, etc. that make up who I am.
From the cerebral to the fantastic, Harmon’s latter chapters venture into artists’ maps, which draft an expressionistic layout for the human condition. Artists like Elsworth Kelly and Claes Oldenburg each explore a personal aesthetic for navigating their respective homes in the world. Meanwhile, Mitsuharu Yamaoka designs biomorphic animal islands and Aleph illustrates the hilarious "Scotland" and "Ireland" as personified geo-cultural morphs.
The book closes with a conversation from Roald Dahl’s unforgettable "BFG," which reminds us to always continue exploring beyond the map. Having scaled Harmon’s pages like William Goldman’s extraordinary Cliffs of Insanity, I finally know where to begin (my latest quest for my private Atlantis).
