White Map

video Installation, 1:30’ on loop, 2011

A map, like all abstractions, is a kind of lie. The world outside our heads, the world inside them, and the lines by which we represent inside and out do not really correspond any more than do a squirt of stars. ~Trickster makes this world, Lewis H

White Map, is a map that is completely blank, apart of a few heavenly coordinates, produced by a typesetter. It becomes a framework for an imagery journey for a poem The Hunting of the Snark, (An Agony in 8 Fits, 1928). A nonsensical poem by Lewis Carroll, who is better known for Alice in Wonderland.

The map is owned by the Bellman, one of the main characters in the poem. It helps the Bellman and his fellow adventurers, who are hunting for a legendary beast called the Snark, to cross the ocean and arrive at a strange land.

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

White Map, goes from full visibility to full blur, turning into an empty space that gives an "unimagined" vision of a world, where boarders, division, and obstacles are swallowed in a white void, and that void loops into the nothingness of light over and over again, invalidating conventions and allows for a view of the world without purpose, a metaphor for all maps by containing the sum of all possible projections.

A.M Qattan Foundation, Ramallah, 2023

Birzeit Univeristy Museum, 2010.