Rachel Clarke

Maps show how human activity shapes, and is shaped by, the environment. Yet, as Clarke reminds us, mapmaking has also served as ‘a tool of control,’ often preceding resource extraction and the imposition of new borders. However precise and objective they may appear, maps present a symbolic version of the world as we have chosen to define it. In Terra Incognita, a title that recalls the phrase once used on maps for unexplored lands, Clarke dismantles an entire American road atlas. Its fragments are extracted, glitched and reassembled in unfamiliar combinations, so that familiar places become uncertain and recognisable pieces form new visual topologies. While the imagery shifts dramatically, the animation is structured as a palindrome, beginning and ending at the same point. This symmetry suggests the possibility of a symbolic reversal of the Anthropocene, of colonial expansion and of the extractive relationship between humans and the environment. Through this act of ‘un-mapping,’ the work opens a way of seeing beyond the world as it has been constructed.