Host: Sofía Sanchez Borboa
According to the American Association of Museums, the average person spends only three seconds in front of a work of art. I got to spend 3 months living in intimacy with Larsen Husby’s piece.
The work is a medium-sized gouache on paper drawing of a map. I always found maps interesting as they reflect who we are rather than what we see. For months, I tried to figure out where this map was from. It is not a grid; that gave me the first clue of where it might be. I carefully looked at the red roads that seemed to be highways; I looked at the yellow streets that interloped the red routes. I looked at the different symbols. There is a cross, so I figured out there was a church. However, I couldn’t discover what the balloons, numbers, black squares, flags, and circles represented. I never did figure out where that map was from, but I enjoyed contemplating it.
I have always liked maps as aesthetic objects to be viewed at home. Although their nature is utilitarian, maps have the ability to transport us somewhere. We tend to be more interested in what they represent rather than the place itself. They are a reflection of wanderlust. They represent something I have been missing since we started quarantining for this pandemic. Maps have a paradoxical character: they are an accurate depiction of a very specific place, but their rendering has endless possibilities.
At the end of my stay with this map, I talked to Husby about his work. He said that he was attracted to how maps are a unique form of reading and a combination of actual text, symbols, and intuitive visual elements. Maps have their own dense visual language crammed with figures and signs that the viewer would have to learn to read if they wanted to actually see it outside its aesthetic qualities. The point of his series of maps is not to think about where they are actually from but to look at it for its formal qualities.
Turns out that the map I had been looking at and trying to figure out where it was from for the past few months was of a northwestern French town.
According to the American Association of Museums, the average person spends only three seconds in front of a work of art. My coworkers, classmates, family, and friends got to spend hours looking at his work on Zoom as it was featured in my background. I got to spend 3 months living in intimacy with Savenay, dreaming of someday visiting it without knowing where it was.
—Sofía Sanchez Borboa