Ten maps to paradise

I would like to make an atlas of ten maps to Paradise. Each map will be large and associated with an architectural location, ideally placed in different and differing architectural settings, old, new, public, private, ecclesiastical and secular. In each case I want to draw the maps straight onto the surface of a series of large plastered walls – ideally across and through a maze of small and large rooms, or around the walls of a large room or hall, ideally with complicated facades to retain some mystery. All parts of the map should not be seen at the same time and from the same vantage-point.
The procedure can be simple. I would use a bucket of black ink and an assortment of brushes, a tall ladder to reach the ceiling… (…)
I suggest the maps should remain in situ for four to six weeks, be photographed for the atlas, and then obliterated to remain in the memory. Their ephemerality will be in keeping with their intended ambition. Paradise is never easy to reach, and the roads to it keep changing.

October 1999

A map to paradise

I am attracted to maps in general and particular maps in particular. And I am especially attracted to maps that do not necessarily explain geography, but maps that symbolically and figuratively might explain a concept of the world. The first maps were about ideas, not geography. For a Christian in the tenth century the most revered maps made Jerusalem the centre of the world and placed Heaven and Hell to the extreme North and the extreme South. Now such maps have become debased, they have become documentary, and relinquished much of their poetic origins. Contemporary maps are admired primarily because of their accuracy. They have become tools for a sense of direction, not designs for encapsulating an ideology, or a concept, or a poetic manifestation, or an ideal. Or an idyl. However all maps operate in a very quiet way. I have never met or seen or heard of a map that shouted. They quietly tell you where you have been, where you are and where you will be, or could be, or might have been, or could be still. Many tenses in one. To match their quietness, they may ften have a secretiveness. I could enjoy the idea of maps found in secret places. Most maps have a private language though that privacy can be shared. Who would know but the informed that a circle surmounted by a cross on a map is not the Venus sign for a female but a round towered church? Maps have secret symbolic languages but often large communities share the secret. I would like to share the secret maps that I have found. I have found maps on the hide of a cow that stood in a meadow at the village of Diss in Suffolk, England, and also analagous maps found in a cow1s hide in a painting by Paulus Potter in a museum at Harlem, Holland, and also maps in a photograph of a cloud of steam that looked like a cow issuing from a grating in a road in Harlem, New York. And I have discovered maps in a bird1s plummage, and maps in letters sent five times through the post between London and Hong Kong picking up scratches and blotches and blemishes of handling along the way. And I have found my own personal maps in the sunlight catching a map of Holland1s Seven provinces on a wall in a Vermeer painting, and also in the sunlight catching the scratches and pits and surfaces on a wall in a Vermeer painting. I enjoy large maps. Borges had a map that was made to the same scale as the forest landscape it mapped, complete with every tree. I enjoy maps that are not flat to the wall, or can be laid on a table. The world is not flat to the wall or can be laid on a table. Most maps are flat representations of a contoured surface. We could anticipate that contoured surface and enjoy its mysteries. I have seen maps of China which are only featureless black jags of mountains without names, and we have all seen maps that are entirely flat blue – featureless rectangles of blueness – maps of the sea. There is much contemplation to be had in both. In response to such maps I once made a map of my own of black jagged emptiness where alternative features were searched for and were to be discovered with great eagerness, and a large map of blueness which was the blueness of the virgin1s gown in a painting by Van Eyck, where, to alleviate the rich empty expanses of coerulean and cobalt, I invented the dribble stains of the infant Christ.

To compound and concentrate these mysteries and excitements I now want to work on a plan to find ten maps of significance, and they must have all the characteristics mentioned above. They must have a combination of public and private languages, they must be large so that they intimate a suggestion of a scale of one to one, they ought to require actions of the body so that I might walk their breadth and width, they must engage in climbing and scouring uneven surfaces in an experience of three dimensions. Having found these maps I want to attempt to decipher their meaning and to pronounce that they are indeed maps that might lead us, not to Berlin or New York, or Tokyo or Ljubljana, or Parma, or Vilnius, though they might do that as an aside, but to Paradise. And everyone probably knows where their Paradise lies, the problem is how to get there.

Another thing: there is a much repeated homily that it is better to travel than to arrive. And I have heard that many think Paradise remains constant, though Hell changes every afternoon. I think that those that say this are referring to a place called Heaven and not Paradise. Heaven and Paradise are not the same place. Heaven to me has always had the characteristics of a place I might not want to go to. So let1s think 3Paradise2. So we must think that the journey to Paradise should be an adventure to be undertaken with delight, and we might not forget that the Paradise reached on a map might not necessarily be the same Paradise intimated by that map.

If these maps cannot be found then we must invent them, or rediscover them, or have them rediscovered, re-find them, re-align them, re-orientate them, all from the evidence of what we have. And having found them, then they must be fixed for a while so that we can experience them, and anticipate the journey, commit the map to memory, for surely a map to Paradise will not stay long. It will fade if we do not use the opportunity to use it. We are familiar with crop-marks that can only be read when the fields are wet after a storm, or covered in a slight fall of snow, or most magically, when the sun is at a low angle to cast shadows that exaggerate a feature long disappeared to a normal discerning eye. This is a good metaphor for the existence of these maps. They can only be read and used for a short time.

So in this attempt to find Paradise, I am in the process of discovering maps in many places. On the walls of a chocolate factory in Malmo in Sweden, in the corridors of a Monastery in Vilnius, on the walls of a stable in Parma. And now we have discovered and at the same time invented or recreated, a map in the kasemate of the castle on the hill in Ljubljana. This kasemate was once a carriage way up a steep hill into a castle that was a prison. Refugees slept here in heat and mostly cold, prisoners were chained here from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Its walls are marked with enigmas, windows, false windows, blocked up windows, doors, false doors, blocked-up doors, lost staircases, long gone sluices, gutters and water-escapes. Heavy stones sustain the thickness of the wall, partly dismantled, to be rebuilt with lesser materials. There are seams of mortar which have a persistence that can impress.

I once met a curator who found runes on a two thousand year-old ivory comb that had lain for two hundred years in a museum without anyone noticing such a correspondence. Painters have found meaning in idle splotches of dribbling paint and they have tried to pass the communication on to us. I have listened with scepticism to archaeologists who have tried to convince me that one flint among thousands is an ancient axe-head. An expert can see a significance where most can only see accident and the marks of casual, unfocused natural events.

This Ljubljana map appears to be divided into 12 sections, perhaps 12 stages of the Cross, and to be arranged around the significances of twelve sites that could be ludic – they certainly are associated with talismans – a feather – this place has been continuously inhabited by rooks and jackdaws and pigeons; blood-stained rags and ropes which could be the remains of the clothes of prisoners or their winter sheets; rings and circles that could be the symbolic evidence of the wheeled carriages that once ran up and down this space in the 14th century.

Peter Greenaway
September 2000

DirectorPeter GreenawayProd. CoMuseum LjubljanaYear2000Servicesposter design