BLUEPRINTS: MAPPING ONE'S PLACE IN THE WORLD
Monograph forthcoming in Taipei, January 2027.
Monograph forthcoming in Taipei, January 2027.
FOREWORD
Mapping One’s Place in the World: Places, Memories and Journeys
Carlos MORENO
urbanist and professor
A map tells us where we are. It represents distances, traces boundaries, names places, and organizes space so that we can find our way. Yet our experience of a territory can never be reduced to what a map is able to show. We inhabit streets, neighborhoods, and cities filled with memories, habits, encounters, and emotions. We pass through certain spaces every day while remaining unaware of others, sometimes only a short distance away. Over time, we thus construct a geography of places and sensations that belongs to us.
To map is therefore also to locate oneself. But beyond determining a point in space, is it not essential to understand the relationships we maintain with the places that make up our existence? Is it not necessary to take this map of familiar places as a starting point from
which to question ourselves, challenge our certainties, and move beyond our comfort zone? Might questions that seem insignificant to us conceal answers we refuse to hear? Perhaps we fear that they might carry us toward other, unknown shores of the self. Other maps then emerge behind the first: sensitive maps, because they touch the invisible, even buried, part within each of us: Who are we? Where do we come from? What paths do we take? Which places have we left behind? In which ones do we feel at home? Which spaces do we associate with a person, a period of time, or an emotion? Alongside measurable geography, there is therefore another geography—lived, shifting, and deeply personal—with another form of cartography.
I have often said that “inhabiting” means far more than having a roof and four walls. I reaffirm that this verb can only be embodied through our ability to weave social relationships and to be close to one another, so that we may share the experiences of our collective lives. It is time to conjugate it with modernity. The Latin habitare has given us the notion of “dwelling,” referring to being in a place. But further back in time, from its root habere, it meant “to have something often,” referring to what one did repeatedly. It is time to rediscover this original habere, to move beyond the notion of the physical place where we spend most of our time and toward the place that generates our most intimate social and sensory experiences. This contemporary form of “inhabiting” thus becomes a kind of personal geography, constructed through contact with others—with those close to us and with those whom we encounter.
To inhabit therefore means gradually giving meaning to what we repeatedly do beyond our dwelling: a street we walk along every morning, where we encounter passersby; the café where we meet someone and say “hello”; the noisy neighborhood market with its colorful stalls; the local school filled with the joy of children; a garden where people talk to one another; a bench where neighbors share fragments of their lives. All these physical placesbecome filled with life when, through our sensory and social perception of the territory, they become points of reference. Two people living in the same city, the same neighborhood, even the same street, may thus inhabit two very different cities. They share an administrative territory, infrastructure, and sometimes the same public spaces, but their intimate maps overlap only partially. Each possesses their own perceptions, familiar places, and unknown territories. A common city therefore contains a multitude of personal geographies. These are constructed less through physical distances than through the intensity of the relationships maintained within these places. A place thousands of kilometers away may remain intimately close, while a nearby street may remain completely foreign to us.
This difference between distance and proximity is essential. It reminds us that our relationship to space is also an experience of time, affection, and connection. This personal geography also allows us to reconsider the idea of belonging. To belong to a place often evokes rootedness: being born somewhere, growing up there, possessing a history there. Yet contemporary societies are profoundly shaped by mobility. We move house, travel, migrate, change neighborhoods or countries, work in one place and live in another. We can belong simultaneously to several places, retain attachments to those we have left, and form new ones. Our personal geography thus becomes a constellation rather than a single territory. Some forms of belonging are inherited; others are chosen. Some last a lifetime; others correspond to a period, an encounter, or an experience. Mobility therefore does not necessarily destroy our connection to place. On the contrary, it can multiply it. Each movement adds a layer to our personal map and transforms the way we look at the territories through which we travel. But what makes a place remain within us after we have left it? Memory plays a fundamental role here. A space becomes a place when it acquires meaning. A street is no longer simply a street when it evokes an encounter. A house is no longer simply a building when it carries the history of a family. A public square can preserve the memory of a celebration, a demonstration, a separation, or a collective event.
The city then appears as a palimpsest: successive experiences are layered upon one another without the previous ones ever disappearing completely. As Italo Calvino so aptly described, there is a visible city and a multitude of invisible cities. The city of childhood, that of previous generations, of migrations, of urban transformations, of vanished buildings and forgotten uses. But also the city that each person carries within. Our memories thus become a form of cartography. They select certain places, erase others, bring distant things closer, and sometimes give immense importance to spaces that are barely more than a few meters across.
It is precisely within this gap between measurable space and lived space that artistic practice can intervene. The artist engaged in mapping is not necessarily someone who draws a map. They may walk, photograph, write, record voices, collect objects, trace routes, or assemble fragments of memory. They may follow a daily trajectory, recover the traces of a vanished place, or connect spaces separated by thousands of kilometers. Artistic practice then becomes a way of making visible what conventional maps leave outside the frame. It can represent emotions, absences, memories, movements, or human relationships, evoking what these mean to those who experience them.“Mapping One’s Place in the World” therefore takes on a particular meaning. To the classic question, “Where am I?”, the artistic gaze turns the question around, turning toward the idea of complexity, from the Latin complexus, “to weave together,” and asking instead, “Where are we?” What connects me to what surrounds me? How can we recover within ourselves the sense of the tree of life that connects us to one another? Artistic cartography then becomes this sap, this vital force that transforms the representation of territory into an experience of self and relationship. It reveals the branches and leaves of our trees of life which, through their interweaving, compose the social forest of our collective experience.
This artistic approach brings to light what we have forgotten in these times of modernity, when our time for living has been taken from us. It reminds us, forcefully, even against our will, that to “inhabit” means above all to encounter, recognize, remember, return, and share. These ordinary experiences transform urban space into lived territory, into memory, sensation, and sharing. Sensitive cartography can then reveal a dimension that traditional representations struggle to grasp: the city as a network of human relationships, within the forest of collective life. To map lived experience is therefore also to recognize this plurality. A sensitive map opens itself to each of us to be interpreted differently, and ultimately to become a territory that each person travels in their own way. Artistic practice can make these relationships perceptible. It transforms the map into a narrative, movement into a trace, memory into territory, and place into relationship. Mapping one’s place in the world means understanding these “veins” that connect us to places, to others, and to our own memory.
Perhaps this is ultimately what it means to “inhabit”: knowing that our place is never simply a point on a map, nor merely a dwelling, but a living geography made of social and emotional proximity; of movements that move us; of attachments lost and others
rediscovered; of memories of a past that follows us and returns to us; and of present-day relationships that make us feel alive.
Mapping One’s Place in the World: Places, Memories and Journeys
Carlos MORENO
urbanist and professor
A map tells us where we are. It represents distances, traces boundaries, names places, and organizes space so that we can find our way. Yet our experience of a territory can never be reduced to what a map is able to show. We inhabit streets, neighborhoods, and cities filled with memories, habits, encounters, and emotions. We pass through certain spaces every day while remaining unaware of others, sometimes only a short distance away. Over time, we thus construct a geography of places and sensations that belongs to us.
To map is therefore also to locate oneself. But beyond determining a point in space, is it not essential to understand the relationships we maintain with the places that make up our existence? Is it not necessary to take this map of familiar places as a starting point from
which to question ourselves, challenge our certainties, and move beyond our comfort zone? Might questions that seem insignificant to us conceal answers we refuse to hear? Perhaps we fear that they might carry us toward other, unknown shores of the self. Other maps then emerge behind the first: sensitive maps, because they touch the invisible, even buried, part within each of us: Who are we? Where do we come from? What paths do we take? Which places have we left behind? In which ones do we feel at home? Which spaces do we associate with a person, a period of time, or an emotion? Alongside measurable geography, there is therefore another geography—lived, shifting, and deeply personal—with another form of cartography.
I have often said that “inhabiting” means far more than having a roof and four walls. I reaffirm that this verb can only be embodied through our ability to weave social relationships and to be close to one another, so that we may share the experiences of our collective lives. It is time to conjugate it with modernity. The Latin habitare has given us the notion of “dwelling,” referring to being in a place. But further back in time, from its root habere, it meant “to have something often,” referring to what one did repeatedly. It is time to rediscover this original habere, to move beyond the notion of the physical place where we spend most of our time and toward the place that generates our most intimate social and sensory experiences. This contemporary form of “inhabiting” thus becomes a kind of personal geography, constructed through contact with others—with those close to us and with those whom we encounter.
To inhabit therefore means gradually giving meaning to what we repeatedly do beyond our dwelling: a street we walk along every morning, where we encounter passersby; the café where we meet someone and say “hello”; the noisy neighborhood market with its colorful stalls; the local school filled with the joy of children; a garden where people talk to one another; a bench where neighbors share fragments of their lives. All these physical placesbecome filled with life when, through our sensory and social perception of the territory, they become points of reference. Two people living in the same city, the same neighborhood, even the same street, may thus inhabit two very different cities. They share an administrative territory, infrastructure, and sometimes the same public spaces, but their intimate maps overlap only partially. Each possesses their own perceptions, familiar places, and unknown territories. A common city therefore contains a multitude of personal geographies. These are constructed less through physical distances than through the intensity of the relationships maintained within these places. A place thousands of kilometers away may remain intimately close, while a nearby street may remain completely foreign to us.
This difference between distance and proximity is essential. It reminds us that our relationship to space is also an experience of time, affection, and connection. This personal geography also allows us to reconsider the idea of belonging. To belong to a place often evokes rootedness: being born somewhere, growing up there, possessing a history there. Yet contemporary societies are profoundly shaped by mobility. We move house, travel, migrate, change neighborhoods or countries, work in one place and live in another. We can belong simultaneously to several places, retain attachments to those we have left, and form new ones. Our personal geography thus becomes a constellation rather than a single territory. Some forms of belonging are inherited; others are chosen. Some last a lifetime; others correspond to a period, an encounter, or an experience. Mobility therefore does not necessarily destroy our connection to place. On the contrary, it can multiply it. Each movement adds a layer to our personal map and transforms the way we look at the territories through which we travel. But what makes a place remain within us after we have left it? Memory plays a fundamental role here. A space becomes a place when it acquires meaning. A street is no longer simply a street when it evokes an encounter. A house is no longer simply a building when it carries the history of a family. A public square can preserve the memory of a celebration, a demonstration, a separation, or a collective event.
The city then appears as a palimpsest: successive experiences are layered upon one another without the previous ones ever disappearing completely. As Italo Calvino so aptly described, there is a visible city and a multitude of invisible cities. The city of childhood, that of previous generations, of migrations, of urban transformations, of vanished buildings and forgotten uses. But also the city that each person carries within. Our memories thus become a form of cartography. They select certain places, erase others, bring distant things closer, and sometimes give immense importance to spaces that are barely more than a few meters across.
It is precisely within this gap between measurable space and lived space that artistic practice can intervene. The artist engaged in mapping is not necessarily someone who draws a map. They may walk, photograph, write, record voices, collect objects, trace routes, or assemble fragments of memory. They may follow a daily trajectory, recover the traces of a vanished place, or connect spaces separated by thousands of kilometers. Artistic practice then becomes a way of making visible what conventional maps leave outside the frame. It can represent emotions, absences, memories, movements, or human relationships, evoking what these mean to those who experience them.“Mapping One’s Place in the World” therefore takes on a particular meaning. To the classic question, “Where am I?”, the artistic gaze turns the question around, turning toward the idea of complexity, from the Latin complexus, “to weave together,” and asking instead, “Where are we?” What connects me to what surrounds me? How can we recover within ourselves the sense of the tree of life that connects us to one another? Artistic cartography then becomes this sap, this vital force that transforms the representation of territory into an experience of self and relationship. It reveals the branches and leaves of our trees of life which, through their interweaving, compose the social forest of our collective experience.
This artistic approach brings to light what we have forgotten in these times of modernity, when our time for living has been taken from us. It reminds us, forcefully, even against our will, that to “inhabit” means above all to encounter, recognize, remember, return, and share. These ordinary experiences transform urban space into lived territory, into memory, sensation, and sharing. Sensitive cartography can then reveal a dimension that traditional representations struggle to grasp: the city as a network of human relationships, within the forest of collective life. To map lived experience is therefore also to recognize this plurality. A sensitive map opens itself to each of us to be interpreted differently, and ultimately to become a territory that each person travels in their own way. Artistic practice can make these relationships perceptible. It transforms the map into a narrative, movement into a trace, memory into territory, and place into relationship. Mapping one’s place in the world means understanding these “veins” that connect us to places, to others, and to our own memory.
Perhaps this is ultimately what it means to “inhabit”: knowing that our place is never simply a point on a map, nor merely a dwelling, but a living geography made of social and emotional proximity; of movements that move us; of attachments lost and others
rediscovered; of memories of a past that follows us and returns to us; and of present-day relationships that make us feel alive.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Witnessing the Blueprint
Gemma Y.J. TSAO
founder and curator of V. Galleria
In the autumn of 2001, on my way to Paris, I met Mei-Tsen.
She lived in an apartment of less than thirty square meters.
The dining table took up most of the room,
and she created in whatever space was left.
Looking back, I’m not sure even she could have said
whether that table was meant for eating or for making art.
Clothes she no longer wore
were stitched, piece by piece,
into curtains for her bedroom.
And from that tiny kitchen,
she somehow managed to conjure up an entire meal for us.
More than twenty years have passed, and I still remember that day.
It was the first time I had come so close to the life of an artist. And it was then that I began to understand: for some, creating is not a profession. It is simply a way of living.
For more than thirty years,
Mei-Tsen has never looked to the market for direction.
Instead, she has turned inward--
into memory,
into family,
toward her own roots.
Some works are understood at once.
Others need time.
She never waited.
She simply kept creating.
In 2023, we came together again at V.galleria through the idea of “Circulation.” What began as a curatorial dialogue also gave me a new way of looking back at the artist I had first encountered more than twenty years before.
Then, in 2026, Blueprint brought us back to works scattered across different moments of her life.
One piece.
Then another.
Only then did we begin to see
that more than thirty years
had been there all along.
From an idea
to a blueprint;
through countless rounds of sorting,
choosing,
and discussing,
until paper, words, and artworks
finally acquired weight.
And one day,
the book could actually be held in our hands.
At that moment,
strangely enough,
I wasn’t thinking about the book.
I was thinking about that small apartment in 2001.
About the person who,
in the little space left beside the dining table,
still had her head down,
quietly making art.
Perhaps what I witnessed then,
without fully understanding it,
was already the beginning of everything I would later encounter in her work.
Some things require a very long journey
before we understand
where they have been leading us.
I feel fortunate
to have walked part of that journey beside her.
And equally fortunate to have witnessed
a blueprint
finally become a book.
Some art needs to be seen.
Some stories need to be preserved.
And some forms of perseverance--
Time knows.
Witnessing the Blueprint
Gemma Y.J. TSAO
founder and curator of V. Galleria
In the autumn of 2001, on my way to Paris, I met Mei-Tsen.
She lived in an apartment of less than thirty square meters.
The dining table took up most of the room,
and she created in whatever space was left.
Looking back, I’m not sure even she could have said
whether that table was meant for eating or for making art.
Clothes she no longer wore
were stitched, piece by piece,
into curtains for her bedroom.
And from that tiny kitchen,
she somehow managed to conjure up an entire meal for us.
More than twenty years have passed, and I still remember that day.
It was the first time I had come so close to the life of an artist. And it was then that I began to understand: for some, creating is not a profession. It is simply a way of living.
For more than thirty years,
Mei-Tsen has never looked to the market for direction.
Instead, she has turned inward--
into memory,
into family,
toward her own roots.
Some works are understood at once.
Others need time.
She never waited.
She simply kept creating.
In 2023, we came together again at V.galleria through the idea of “Circulation.” What began as a curatorial dialogue also gave me a new way of looking back at the artist I had first encountered more than twenty years before.
Then, in 2026, Blueprint brought us back to works scattered across different moments of her life.
One piece.
Then another.
Only then did we begin to see
that more than thirty years
had been there all along.
From an idea
to a blueprint;
through countless rounds of sorting,
choosing,
and discussing,
until paper, words, and artworks
finally acquired weight.
And one day,
the book could actually be held in our hands.
At that moment,
strangely enough,
I wasn’t thinking about the book.
I was thinking about that small apartment in 2001.
About the person who,
in the little space left beside the dining table,
still had her head down,
quietly making art.
Perhaps what I witnessed then,
without fully understanding it,
was already the beginning of everything I would later encounter in her work.
Some things require a very long journey
before we understand
where they have been leading us.
I feel fortunate
to have walked part of that journey beside her.
And equally fortunate to have witnessed
a blueprint
finally become a book.
Some art needs to be seen.
Some stories need to be preserved.
And some forms of perseverance--
Time knows.
