Compo(-sites) (2007) | Performative Drawing

Compo(-sites) is a cartographic intervention that disrupts the logic of the tourist map by treating its boundaries as sites of encounter rather than limits.

A tourist map is divided into four equal sections, which are then displaced and rotated: north-west becomes south-east, north-east becomes south-west, and so on. Once reassembled, the original edges of the map meet at its centre. Cutting therefore becomes a form of construction, producing new streets from previously unrelated fragments of the map.

Two streets, each belonging to a different section, are arbitrarily joined along their newly adjacent boundaries. These accidental connections become the basis for a series of photographs documenting the resulting composite streets—fictional passages assembled from two separate geographies.

The project proposes a simple cartographic operation with unexpected consequences: by dismantling and recombining a map, familiar destinations become unfamiliar, boundaries become meeting points, and new places emerge from the spaces between them.

The result is an inverted map, new tourist sites, and streets that exist only through the arbitrary joining of two otherwise unrelated places.

CUT – Divide a tourist map into four equal sections.
 

DISPLACE – Exchange their positions.
 

PASTE – Reassemble the fragments so that their former boundaries converge at the centre.

 

PHOTOGRAPH – The map intersections are visited in person, photographed then spliced together.