At the Royal Museum for Central Africa on the outskirts of Brussels, four monumental wall maps from 1910 are on display, showcasing Belgian colonial interests. These maps are dense with information, including exchange rates of resources, pricing structures tied to extraction, and the market value assigned to enslaved people. They serve as a striking example of how land could be occupied and made profitable, and their purpose was not merely to record an empire, but to diagram the process of colonization. The image of these maps has stayed with me since I first saw them last winter, perhaps because they so clearly illustrate the violence embedded in systems of land measurement, and also because they were originally installed to persuade viewers to invest in Belgium’s colonial expansion. Now, protected by national heritage laws, they remain fixed to the walls, serving as a backdrop to displays of objects and resources acquired, in part, through the extractive logic they encode.
Maps often appear to be objective, but they are actually constructed from choices that frame a particular view of the world. They offer a surface on which land appears ordered, bounded, and knowable, and they are doubly instructional in the knowledge they share and in the ways they orient the viewer. A recent series of exhibitions in New York, featuring the works of late Venezuelan conceptual artist Claudio Perna, Chicano artist Sandy Rodriguez, and Dominican artist Firelei Báez, highlights the charged surface of maps across generations of artists who use cartography’s capacity for orientation in alternative ways. These artists turn maps from tools of classification into frameworks for examining movement, memory, and power, demonstrating how maps can be used to challenge dominant narratives and offer new perspectives on the world.
