EPHEMERAL ATLAS
A project by BABAS
with maps by Giulia De Amicis
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
John Keats
We draw maps of the world as a guide for travellers, as if the world were to remain the same. We know it changes, and yet we measure the planet: we capture it on paper, with a certain degree of approximation. An approximation suited to human life: on a scale with us in space and time.
The map of Lake Como changes more slowly than the lake itself; but, for us, it works. For a creature living a hundred thousand of our years, it would merely be a snapshot of a fleeting moment.
The planet is composed of infinite planets in perpetual flux. We draw maps of its evanescence.
Everything is relative. Mountains are the earth’s waves, moving ever so slowly. Clouds are continents of water and ice, on a perpetual journey. Lakes appear, grow and dry up, following the breath of the glaciers. Rivers change course; cities are born, transform and fade away over the centuries and millennia.
A drop of water is a universe containing a multitude of creatures and stories, and a puddle is someone else’s lake. A lake of more limited size, of shorter life; yet it has shores and islands and beaches and reflections and creatures living on its banks and, with a bit of luck, it has a sunset.
The Ephemeral Atlas invites us to appreciate the planet’s fleeting splendour.
It does so through a video, filmed in various parts of the Mediterranean basin, and through a collection of maps. The maps were drawn by Giulia De Amicis based on photographs I took of microscopic panoramas – phenomena lasting but a moment – and show the actual geographical coordinates.
It is a paradoxical undertaking: whilst the video draws us into the movement and flow of becoming, with a slow rhythm that makes us lose our bearings between the microcosm and the macrocosm, the maps surrounding it do exactly the opposite, capturing and freezing what lasts only a moment. But it does not matter if it is only a moment: it happened.
A cloud, Claude – an island in the sky, the journey of water unfolding before our very eyes – inspired me to name its bays and hills after travellers and explorers: the work has become a journey for me too, an exploration of stories and figures less well-known than those found on our street signs, but which I find more interesting. I am drawing an ideal world and have chosen to celebrate those whose stories fascinate me most.
Thus, ephemeral geography has also, inevitably, become a personal cosmogony.
The most beloved storytellers name the peaks and valleys of Cortázar, a delicate landscape carved by the sea and the wind into the sand; the ships that have sailed the sea christen the raindrops that streak down a train window and come together to form the Gulliver River. Shamans, deities, and human beings who have sought a bridge to other animals name a footprint left in the snow—the Walden lowlands.
Every map has a naming system inspired by the nature of the place: an arbutus fruit is the planet Plotinus, dedicated to the philosophers of nature, and Luts’s lotus leaves evoke the temptations and distractions of psychotropic substances. The ripples created by a drop in the water form the Om planetary system, and its planets are voices; a puddle is Keats Lake, called after poets. Great film characters give names to the patches of snow on the Lumière Plain, and the crest of a breaking wave is the Houdini mountain range, the realm of magicians and illusionists.
Each map is accompanied by the photograph from which it originated and a text.
CLAUDE
The cloud flies, falls, passes through every living being that inhabits the small planet. It has known them all. It has travelled through roots, leaves, mouths and blood vessels. It has sunk into the earth and evaporated through countless pores. It has raced in streams and rivers and rested in quiet puddles. It has advanced, slow and mighty, in large, cold, luminescent masses. It flies and then returns to the sea, the great mother from whom all clouds are born.
The HOUDINI Mountains
You need ears as big as cathedrals to hear the sound made by the earth’s waves - the mountains - as they move ever so slowly. With our ephemeral ears, as small as shells, we can hear the sound of the Houdini Mountains: fleeting apparitions, masters of vanishing. They rise and fall so rapidly that only magic, or the utmost attention, can allow us to glimpse them, for a moment, on a clear day.
The Plain of LUMIÈRE
At the edge of the world, on the border between wakefulness and dreams, lies the Plain of Lumière. It is a region of light and shadow, in constant motion. Here, stories and visions come to life: its inhabitants are ghosts who can travel through the minds of men and take up residence in the great sea of imagination that connects them all.
The OM Planetary System
In the beginning was the Word: the sound that gave birth to the universe. Every other voice is born of this vibration. The Om planetary system continues to expand: the voices that sang their songs are still travelling through space. Perhaps one day they will take a great curve and we shall hear them, clear and vibrant, just a step away.
KEATS Lake
Keats appears serene even when the fiercest winds blow; only the rain can disturb its surface. But underneath the lake is always turbulent. In its depths dwell and stir abyssal creatures: sudden fears, memories, intuitions, and great longings. For this reason, bathing in its waters is very dangerous and almost always inevitable if one is young, in love, or very alive.
LUTS
The island has its own sweet beauty and an architecture that is like an ambush: all paths lead to the same place. A strange drowsiness, a vagueness, and at times a hypnotic euphoria overtakes those who arrive in Luts. This unclaimed realm, with its incomprehensible yet perfect design, can be a gentle yet fatal trap for those who linger there too long.
PLOTINUS
Every world is a fruit, every fruit is a world. It is born, grows, ripens, decays: it is an explosion that may last for hours or eons. Its seeds wander through space. To be reborn, one must be eaten. The soul travels through the flesh and the sugary body of a red and wild planet.
CORTÁZAR’S Cliffs
As a story is made up of a finite number of words, so Cortázar’s valleys and crevasses are made up of a finite number of grains of sand. The sand is destined to become ever finer, to slip away, to transform into something else that we can no longer see. Words, too, tend to disappear. But some people’s words linger longer; they fade away much more slowly.
The WALDEN Lowlands
The moon’s great craters are the imprints of celestial bodies. We, too, are celestial bodies, and with every step we leave a footprint on the planet’s skin. These fleeting tracks – the footsteps left by all creatures – form the delicate alphabet of desires, of bewilderment, and of encounters between living beings. They say that Walden is the footprint of a mythological being and dates back to a time when there was no distinction between nature and the divine.
GULLIVER
No river is where it seems to be. Every day its silvery body shifts, undulating and inventing new dances. A river is a caravan of droplets voyaging above and beneath the planet’s skin. Gulliver runs fast along the window of a train travelling between Rome and Milan, on the Earth that spins and revolves through the universe. Yet not a single drop is lost. Each one is exactly where it needs to be, in that very instant.
The Ephemeral Atlas is a way of honouring the beauty of the world.
