Ellipsis (2020)
“Ellipsis” (2020) is based on fictional conversations with Eli Heimans during field research in Germany for the project The Three Stages (2017- ongoing), archival documents and the geographic maps incorporated in the tapestry Zur Geologie des Gerolsteiner Landes (2020). It was published in Tijdschrift Kunstlicht, VOL. 41 NO 2-3, 2020, WRITING NEW LEGENDS / (MIS)INTERPRETING MAPS.
“What are you looking for?” you ask, your voice cut off by the sound of the river. You are standing on the nearest rock. I wonder how you got there. After you help me onto the footing, there is a long silence while we look out over the landscape.1
I have been tracing fading perspectives of history, not only mapping geographical references from your articles, but also references to plants and birds, mentions of the weather, road conditions, personal memories, and endless sidetracks of historical references. They all come together as a path for fieldwork, as guides through libraries, natural collections, gated gardens, and paper-filled archives. I have been mapping and sorting out hundreds of articles2 for months, wandering through natural landscapes. I went looking for your grave and found out that you passed away during a geological excursion in Germany. I decided to finish the excursion. And now you ask me what I am looking for?
Your personal collection3, archived at the Heimans and Thijsse Foundation in the Artis library, consists of two A4 boxes made of acid-free cardboard. The archive contains only a single map you drew of the Gerolstein area. The map does not have a legend, so there is no way to understand the meaning of the colours used underneath the lines, the town names, or the arrows and symbols, but to go to the area yourself.
A map is such an abstract thing. A drawing of the earth’s surface, or at least a small part of it. Marking the shapes and positions of different countries, political borders, natural features (like the sea or the mountains) and arranged man-made features (like roads and buildings). But within that seemingly timeless, silent abstraction, a fiction suddenly comes to life.
“What are you looking for?” you ask again, your voice sounding more urgent this time. I unfold the map and look at the areas marked with pencil. “Never look in the places in which it says something interesting can be found. It is never there. It will have long been emptied,” a man assured us when we stood in the hall of the museum, feeling lost as we gazed over our maps. I place the map against the rock wall next to me so we both can look at it. Your glasses slide to the top of your nose as you peer out over their edge to look at the markings that I just stared at without result. “Here!” you say. Your fingers draw the line of an unfamiliar route, from one point to another. Once more you set out which way to go, but I feel I eventually have begun figuring this out myself. You inspect the area thoroughly, as if you are searching for something. As if you are studying your own footprints, over and over, as if you are exploring an area no one has discovered before. A ‘new’ piece of nature.
I look back at the imaginary line you drew on the piece of paper. The points you connected become more than simply abstract points on a map. They have become a beginning and an end.
