GERHARD MARX

Spatial Imaginaries, Propositional Cartographies focusses Marx’s engagement with the physical and ideological constructions of space onto the complication of spatial imaginaries. ‘Spatial imaginaries’ are the descriptions of space that alters, makes and shapes that which it describes. It marks the interface between the physical and the ideological; between the terrestrial, and the metaphors, visuals and languages used to engage it.

Marx uses the logic of collage to meticulously fragment and disassemble existing cartographies in order to carefully ‘grow’ them into a constellation of ‘propositional cartographies’. In the process of developing his own two dimensional as well as three-dimensional constructions, Marx reflects on an array of alternate spatial conceptions.

Central to this is Nadia Yala Kisukidi’s reflection on diasporic identity. Kisukidi suggests the possibility of inhabiting two places at once; suggesting the idea of embodying a ‘double presence’, of ‘thinking from two places’.

Other spatial re-imaginings that find resonance in this body of work engages the image of the globe as one of containment, of parts contained by a whole. Jean-Luc Nancy suggests replacing the idea of the ‘Globus’ (the image of containment) with that of the ‘Glomus’, an entity characterised by boundless agglomeration and endless proliferation¹. Bruno Latour adds to this reimagining of the globe²; ‘Ecology’, says Latour, ‘is not so much a matter of parts and whole, but is rather a series of overlapping entities.’³By meticulously re-constructing cartographies into ‘Propositional Cartographies’, Marx deliberately complicates the flat rectangular format normative to cartography, (or drawing board, aerial photograph, or screen), as a means to question its instrumentalization of a thinking that favours distinct boundaries, linear narratives, and other exclusionary practices that operates through simplification of Geo-spatial dimensionality and Spatio-temporal complexity.

Marx coaxes his cartographies into more complicated geometries as a way of considering possibilities of constructing visual metaphors that will facilitate a kind of thinking that facilitates complexity, ambivalence and multiplicity. To this end the works favour geometric strategies that overlap, intersect, unfold, layer, and complicate. For each work, a particular logic was developed and the work was then left to ‘grow’ into its own complexity. The result is a series of ‘unfoldings’; a series of cartographies that suggest a spatial imaginary which aspires to hold multiple positionalities, doubled presences, failed containments, lapsed distances, histories folded into one another, interwoven geographies, worlds that exist across, in between and amongst: a series of propositional cartographies.