The Tourist
Work in Progress
The map below is a new invented landscape (inspired by my childhood map) which contains the names of over a 100 places associated with my family heritage. Even now, creating the map (and indeed the world it depicts) gave me a buzz like I used to feel as a child, creating something entirely new which straddles both the mental and physical worlds. In many ways then, the created world is the perfect metaphor for the individual.
Below is a detail showing one of those places; Pantygasseg in Monmouthshire, Wales.
I took the shape of the island from an aerial photograph of the Bełżec death camp (see below). I wanted to make the link between a place (Bełżec) and the individual/victim, but to show that these individuals/victims, like all people came into existence through the unlikely combination of many hundreds of people in places.
The work based on this photograph (complimenting the invented world map above) comprises 180 postcards each with the name of a place. At the Bełżec memorial, when you walk around the memorial's perimeter, you see the names of places from where the camp's victims were taken written on the steps.
With every step, another name is revealed. Every day, with every step we take as individuals, we too have hundreds of places behind us. This memorial therefore serves not only to remind us of the places from which the 500,000 victims were taken, but also the miraculousness of every individual in respect of the impossible physical/geographical blueprint from which we derive.
I wanted therefore to show the aerial view of Bełżec, but also the places from where the victims were taken, arranging them so as to allude to the invented world map above. The following image shows that view.
The image is made to exactly the same dimensions as the map above, the squares of which (represented on the map by the lines of longitude and latitude) are in the above image individual postcards (the postcards representing the relationship between different people in different places; one in one places writes to one in another - more often than not back home). Each postcard contains a place, the number of people deported from that town and the date of deportation. One of the postcards which make up the image can be seen below:
