Missive from Mexico City: Dissolve at the ELSE Foundation
/We enjoyed immensely the opportunity to present our two projects — Dissolve’s issue on Cartographies in Translation and the upcoming Bureau of Longitudes — at the Transart Institute for Creative Research and the ELSE Foundation’s symposium on contemporary approaches to cartography and global entanglement. The symposium took place at Casa Maauad in Mexico City on January 13 to 14, 2018. Here are three of our editors following the presentation.
As part of our presentation, we shared an evocative video piece from our interview with Shaghayegh Cyrous for Trace. The collaborative video piece by Shirin Abedinirad and Dionne Lee is titled Before Getting on With the World Again and shows clouds merging and crossing through each other above two disparate points on the globe, Tehran (Iran) and Oakland, California (US).
Christopher Squier presents at the ELSE Foundation. On the screen, Shirin Abedinirad and Dionne Lee’s video project Before Getting on With the World Again.
We also shared a poem by Moira Roth, written in English and translated into Spanish for our fifth issue on Cartographies. Two of our editors exchanged stanzas of the poem, so that only a bilingual audience would understand the totality of the work. The piece is the 36th map in Roth’s Library of Maps and is titled The Map of the Sleepers / El Mapa de los Durmientes. As such, it became the perfect site for experimental exchange alongside the themes of The Bureau of Longitudes: the address the absurdist logic of globally-organized space; time zone-based dissonances; temporal lag, drag, and (im)permanence; and the quixotic and overlapping modalities through which we see, understand, and experience the imaginaries of place, from its fantasies to its realities.
Map 36 (English) / Mapa 36 (Español)
By Moira Roth / de Moira Roth
The Map of the Sleepers / El Mapa de los Durmientes
Over time,
The librarians became used to
The silent, still presence of the Sleepers.
They slept in the basement of the Library,
On two silver beds
Under coverlets of yellow velvet,
And one of the duties of any Chief Librarian
Was to see to their well-being.
A lo largo de la pared principal del sótano,
Bajo una pequeña ventana,
Había una lámina de un extraño metal resplandeciente,
Y cada mañana,
Cuando la Bibliotecaria Encargada
Venía a revisar sus tareas,
Encontraba nuevas marcas en el metal:
Usually white and red lines,
Which, finally,
Became so overlaid
Que el Mapa aparecía como una telaraña
De borrosos hilos delgados.
Los escolásticos,
Que habían sido traídos
Para estudiar estas marcas extrañas,
Proclamaron
That they must be charts
Of the Sleepers’ journey—
But could speculate no further.
Una madrugada,
La Bibliotecaria Encargada caminó hacia el sótano
Only to find that the Map
And the Sleepers had disappeared
Y que el sol naciente
Estaba encendido con rayos blancos y rojos.
She gasped,
As did the Old Astronomer in his observatory,
Realizing that the Sleepers’ Map,
Con su sinfín de líneas blancas y rojas,
Was just like the one
They had created from two separate dreams—
Of a city of marble and water,
Y otra de fuego.
Ambos estaban horrorizados
Por la aparición de este sol transfigurado,
And what it meant.
