Astral Planes

Remapping: Bouchra Khalili revisits 'The Mapping Journey Project', charting resistance and decolonizing the shape of the Mediterranean Interview by Marko Gluhaich

- MARKO GLUHAICH

MARKO GLUHAICH After completing 'The Mapping Journey Project' [2008-11] - a series of videos documenting eight individuals' migratory routes around the Mediterranean - you created 'Constellations' [2011], a corresponding series of silkscreen prints that reproduced those same mapped-out routes as astrological constellations. Could you tell me about the origins of your thinking through this concept and how it's developed since you first introduced it into your practice?

BOUCHRA KHALILI I have always been fascinated by geographical atlases and astronomy. The first book I remember reading was a history of geography during the Islamic Golden Age, which also covered astronomy and botany. I've often mentioned the influence of the Tabula Rogeriana, created by the Moroccan cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi in the 12th century, which was the most comprehensive atlas of the known world at the time. There is a map of the Mediterranean attributed to him that depicts the region 'upside down': what we consider the North is placed in the South, and vice versa. I've never forgotten that map and, when I became an artist, it remained a central reference in my work.

But my relationship with astronomy is also conceptual, even methodological. I can't think of a project without 'projecting' a constellation: I first see fragments, then draw lines and, from there, connections emerge. This process is literally how the works you mention were created. One piece even forms a discourse on method: