Artist: Kaspar Wimberley
Here be dragons is a journey to the holes and cracks that quietly form along the folds of a well used map, escaping into spaces that in this particular context have ceased to exist, and documenting the permanence and impermanence that can be found there. If we consider the number of maps in circulation we can assume that these expanding holes can be found in various sizes at almost every location.
An urban legend claims that early cartographers labelled lands that had not been mapped or documented with the phrase ‘Here be dragons’. In reality this sentence has only been found on the Lennox Globe (ca. 1503-7), although early cartographers were known to draw fantastic and fearful beasts in remote unexplored corners of the world.
In an exercise of interactive documentation, we have been searching for the monsters and dragons that lurk within these disappearing territories, exploring the fear and exclusion of the unknown or foreign and how shifting communities and cultures are infiltrating previously ‘mapped’ situations. A fluid landscape requiring fluid thought processes.
Here be dragons has been enacted throughout Europe, first presented at the Get Lost Festival in Manchester as part of Territories Reimagined.
