Sophie Bouvier Ausländer’s cards do not give in at first sight. The attentive eye recognizes roads and landforms, crossroads and borders. The uncovered gaps unveil notions of territory and identity. Maps can be produced by geographer, or States or explorers, “collectivities and people are the first to map their way of occupying their territories, by their practices, material and symbolic occupations, by their myths and even their dreams”. (Deleuze, 1993, p. 83 ; Glowczewski, 1991). »
If cartography is moving, it is because it feeds on the practices of individual and/or collective appropriation of the environnement. “There is no “territory” without and act of appropriation, even appropriation without specific signs that expresses that appropriation and realizes it at the same time – those are two correlate aspects of this act : to mark one’s territory”.
By occulting the initial support of the map, Sophie Bouvier Ausländer erects the difficulty to mark both the geographical configuration and the identity of the territory. The scraping process of the paint surface however, subtracts a few plots of the map from the overlap. From these enigmatic points, the eye traces a terrestrial constellation and covers much more than a topography. It is paradoxically by covering the map that the artist frees the support from its symbolical charge.
“Printed map is here the archive that needs to be covered in order to be re-discovered methodically, as a new object”.
The modes of representation, the movements of territories and the natural configuration are all identification markers. By isolating a road, a geographical landmark, Sophie Bouvier Ausländer takes the viewer further away from the comfort zone in which the map would keep its primary function : to guide Man, and thereby, to position him in the world.
In his 1924 documentary, Das Wolkenphänomen von Maloja, Arnold Franck films the meteorological phenomenon of Engandine’s clouds, also called the “Majola’s snake”. It is a cloudy mass that stretches itself during autumn in this switz Alps region, from Sils Maria to Silvaplana. When this thick fog pours, the reliefs of the valley are erased. Only the mountain’s extremities escape from this serpentine cloudiness that redraws the landscape in a game between fulls and empties. It is by the absence of elements directly recognizable that Sophie Bouvier Ausländer succeeds to create new topographies. The parts of the map, partially univeiled, like sparse clouds, invoke new images : “the value of an image measures itself by the spread of its imaginary aura”. The artist not only revisitates map as a support, but also the imaginary that comes with it. Just like these clouds, these “marvelous constructions of the intangible”, the paint applied by the artist runs through the cards : most of the time it has the density of a cumulus, sometimes the irregularity of a cirrocumulus, or even the evanescence of a cirrus.
Territories are also the scene of metamorphoses : men occupy them, cross them and transform them.
Sophie BOUVIER AUSLÄNDER
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