Reflection on “Map and Territory”

Over the past year, I have been working on a series of paintings. As always, I began without a concrete concept in mind. At the end of 2023, I had a solo exhibition at PONTI in Antwerp where I explored the concept of the Vessel. Although this body of work did not necessarily feel like an endpoint, I did sense that I needed a new perspective on the same subject. I decided to set aside the idea of the vessel for a while and start again with a fresh slate.

For a time, I wandered, exploring a number of, for now, dead ends. One day, however, while visiting the collection of old masters at the KMSKA with my students, I came across a painting by Teniers. It made a deep impression on me. The painting in question, The City of Valenciennes, is, in my view, a very strange painting because it combines extremely different genres within a single image in a way I had not seen before.

In the center, framed by a kind of window — we look from the inside out — we see an expansive city from a bird’s-eye or even satellite perspective. Around it are armies and fortifications: the city is depicted under siege. Higher up, still within the window frame, the satellite image transitions almost seamlessly into a side view of the city, above which floats the Kingdom of God.

Around the edges of the window, we find a constellation of small still lifes depicting the paraphernalia of warfare: weapons, armor, flags, drums, and trumpets. There are also two small medallions, each offering yet another view of the city. All of this hangs from a sort of ribbon tied around the window. In several places, the rigid window frame frame is visually broken up by these miniature still-lifes, especially at the top, where they mostly fall within the window frame.

The bottom edge of the window is formed by an accumulation of various objects. In the middle, we see a group of sculptures holding up a white cloth. Something was likely written or meant to be written on it once, but it is no longer visible. On either side of this sculptural group are a series of portrait medallions. Those closer to the center are flanked by cherubs; the others are underlined by fluttering ribbons.

What does this work aim to achieve? On the one hand, the painting functions as a kind of historical record: it seeks to communicate something concrete: the battle or siege and its geographic circumstances, the different parties involved, the technologies and weapons used; all within a single work. This nexus between the transmission of information on one hand and painterly or visual qualities on the other is deeply fascinating to me.

I found a similar quality in the etchings of Piranesi. They are diagrams, schemes, architectural plans, elevations, and details — but at the same time, they are much more than that, purely through the way they are composed on a single plate. They become a compositional play of positive and negative space, of rhythm, light, and dark. In this way, these prints transcend their purely “informative” status and become images in their own right.

These two influences together opened the door for me to the 16th- and 17th-century prints from our regions and their aesthetic qualities. In that time, a print was primarily intended to illustrate, to facilitate the transfer of information. An etching or engraving was one of the few ways to integrate images with printed text and distribute them widely through the printing press.

A popular genre was the military print, as it was the era of the Eighty Years’ War between the Low Countries and Spain: a period marked by the rise and widespread use of gunpowder and subsequent innovations in the design and construction of forts and urban defence systems. In a way, I find the compositions that arise from the tension between what to show and what to leave out in these prints — just as in Piranesi’s work — extremely compelling. The balance between what is necessary and what is not, in relation to what must be represented, is drawn very sharply. And paradoxically, perhaps, it is precisely this selectivity that makes them such strong visual images. Landscapes and cities are abstracted into planes with little internal detail. We see the contours of cities and their fortifications in relation to the lines of important roads or rivers and possible troop movements. Even the (often minimal) legend plays an important compositional role.

In the spring of 2025, I received an interesting query that would give new momentum to my ongoing research: a commission to draw a map for a festival. Of course this was not the place to simply reproduce the aesthetics of a 16th-century print and so I broadened the scope of my research to include the aesthetic qualities of modern maps as well. Gradually, the question arose: “What, in essence, is a map actually?”

Essentially, I think, it is an abstracted representation of reality — of the complex world around us. A map is only useful because of its abstraction.A map that tried to replicate reality exactly would be so detailed that it would become unusable again. The purpose of a map is precisely to reduce the complexity of the world around us, to impose a certain order, to make choices about what is and isn’t represented within its frame. Thus, a map does not strive for a “true” representation but instead offers a simplified reality: one that becomes readable and interpretable and it is on the basis of this simpler, clearer version of the world that we orient ourselves, that we make our decisions of where to go, how to spend, what to eat.

If we take this as the most rudimentary definition of a map, it quickly becomes clear that the idea of “map” encompasses far more than the cliché image of a two-dimensional representation of the earth’s surface. All kinds of data, in any form, that are somehow brought together into a representation of a portion of the world can be called a map. A spreadsheet, for example, is also a kind of map albeit a very different one. It too forms a representation of a piece of reality and, rather than striving for perfect reproduction, uses abstraction to help us make choices and orient ourselves financially, mathematically and organizationally.

These representations of the world are not necessarily subordinate to that world. Since we tend to adjust our actions to the map rather than the territory, the map gains a certain power over the territory. It will in part (mentally) shape the territory. The lines on the map are powerful in that they guide our behavior. They define boundaries, rules, norms, “a right course of action”, upon which we then base our actions. A drawn road implies that it should be followed: that one doesn’t simply walk across a field or through someone’s garden. A drawn wall or border defines a “here” and a “there.” It divides space into different zones where different rules apply. Decisions made by individuals or institutions, once sedimented into a given map, sustain themselves over time because the map legitimizes them. I think, for instance, of the story of the island of California: a persistent misconception in the 17th century that, because it appeared on several important maps, managed to survive for almost 150 years before it was finally corrected after overwhelming evidence. People were inclined to believe the map over reality and maps become the basis for other maps which again reproduced this error.

I believe that certain powerful maps in this way can become so deeply internalized that they begin to reshape our very thought structures. They become part of our culture and are passed down from generation to generation, until we no longer even question why we act in certain ways in the world: we no longer truly look at or interact with the world itself, only with the map, it’s representation. In an era like ours, in which more and more of these powerful maps are being developed: maps that approximate reality ever more closely, or perhaps more precisely: that, through their comprehensiveness, succeed in creating a new, or several parallel, “realities” — we might have to start asking what role the territory still has to play.

Today, different groups of people understand the world through entirely different maps.
They look at reality through another lens: they see different lines, different regions, different modes of trade and life. This lens is less and less a cultural (that is, geographically or historically determined) construct, and increasingly defined by browsing behavior and social media algorithms. In a sense, these are no longer interactions with a real world, but with a meta-world (pun not intended). People are judged on how they read “maps”, and then grouped with others who interpret maps in similar ways, so that maps can be developed specifically tailored to their own map-reading behavior. In other words: subtle meta-level differences between neighbors can lead to completely different interfaces though which they see and interact with the world.

We live in a world, a society;, that has lost its connection with the territory, the foundation upon which everything once rested. Maps have become so pervasive that they define our field of vision. They become the medium, the interface through which we interact with the world, through which we understand it. The fish does not question the water it swims in because it is all-encompassing — just as we can no longer distinguish the map from the territory.

Our longing for certainty, for a clear framework, for predictability, our aversion to risk, is being hijacked by a number of techno-shamans or populists who present us with a series of new worlds that are smooth, form-fitted, comfortable but precisely for that reason, also violent toward a reality that is not like that. Almost all the walls immortalized in those 17th-century prints no longer exist today, even though they carried a similar promise.

In a way, I think our intellect is our undoing. The actions of the animal are in complete harmony with its territory: they cannot be seen apart from the territory. We, however, possess the capacity for abstraction — and through it, we continually seek ways to transcend the chaos and randomness of the real world around us. Yet it now seems that this reflex merely erects new walls that, from one perspective, protect and guide us but from another, simply imprison us within an artificial world. I’m not saying we have to go regress to our animal past but the only way out of this self-made cage is to engage once more with reality, with the territory. To face disorder, messiness, the lack of clarity and certainty and to learn to deal with it. The map can be an invaluable tool in this mission as it provides us with a way to oriënt and understand but we cannot look at maps and think we’re seeing the world. We have to actually go out there.