shashasha

The images in Izabela Pluta’s book “Figures of Slippage and Oscillation” were sampled from three editions of the “Reader’s Digest Great World Atlas”: one published in 1961, another in 1968, and a third in 1970.

1961 saw the building of the Berlin Wall, the establishment of the Peace Corps, the inauguration of John F Kennedy; by 1968, Kennedy had been assassinated, and social movements and protests began to spread around the world; 1970 saw the creation of the “Earth Day”, and the first flight of the world’s first jumbo jet.

Pluta’s book remixes, recontextualizes, reworks the maps in the three atlases, blurring borders and countries and defamiliarizing the world as we knew it.

Featuring texts by poet Lisa Gorton and Isobel Parker Philip, “Figures of slippage and oscillation” reappraises our philosophical and conceptual grappling with geography and cartography the fog of arbitrariness bankrupts the law and lore of our oceans and lands; the echo of violence, migration and climatic shift belies our borders. In the process, Pluta whispers to the fragility of our geological, environmental and societal condition. As the oceans wash through our now quaint delineations, she archives our loss. — from the publisher’s description