Review
Review: an exhibition of hand-drawn city maps that lets you get lost
Two hundred maps, none of them accurate and all of them true. A small museum makes a quiet case for drawing the places we live by hand.
Culture editor
4 min read
The show runs across four rooms of the old customs house until January.
The first map in the show is wrong. The river bends the wrong way, the cathedral sits where the bus station should be, and a note in pencil says only: this is how I walked to school.
It sets the rules for everything that follows.
Drawn from memory
The curators asked two hundred residents to draw their city without looking anything up. The results hang unframed, pinned at eye level, and the effect is closer to reading letters than looking at art.
Nobody drew the ring road. Almost everybody drew a bakery.
What people leave out turns out to be the point. Whole districts vanish. A night-shift nurse draws only the streets that are lit at 4am.
Where it loses its way
The final room, a digital wall that merges every drawing into one average city, is the only misstep. The sum is smoother and duller than any of its parts.
That is a small complaint about a generous show. Go slowly, and leave time for the table at the exit, where you are handed a pencil.
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Sofia Brandt
Culture editor
Sofia edits the culture pages and writes about music, work and the crafts we are losing.
