Tracing Terra / Theatrum Orbis Terrarum

Screen prints, engravings, drawings, pigment prints, etc., 2012–ongoing.

Conceived as a long-term project, this cycle uses plans as a medium through which to investigate our planned and built environment. In these plans, I trace and elaborate tendencies, logics, claims to power, ideologies, and cosmologies, condensing what is dispersed across space and time and thereby making it legible. The plans can thus be understood as forms of notation in which social orders, political programs, ideologies, economic systems, and claims to power inscribed in the built environment are recorded, speculatively reworked, and critically examined. Particular attention is given to moments in which functional planning and utopian aspirations turn into their opposite: when the pursuit of efficiency and large-scale organization produces inhuman conditions, and when seemingly neutral structures reveal their ideological foundations. The cycle comprises a continually growing body of large-format plan drawings. These works have a pronounced material presence and are, in some cases, made using pulverized building materials and pigments gathered from different places. The built environment they address is therefore physically present within the works themselves.