Sabine Rethore

Sabine Rethore, an artist in the world of maps

Ever since I started working on maps and globes, I have attempted to provide the public with a cartography based on new landmarks, because the geographic transcription on map or globe isn't as automatic as a long tradition of ethnocentric representations of the world would have us believe. Because I am French, I've inherited one of the world's richest cartographic histories, but also a geography paradoxically closed to others or to plurality.

Since 1998, the absence of choice in the representation of the earth has been a main problem for me. Travellers told me about maps on which the world was upside down, or American maps based on the American continent, but it was impossible to obtain these in France.These models were oddities that were talked about, but never seen. As to the planispheres that one could buy, they were never complete .Certain parts of the Southern hemisphere were always masked. The atlas that I had chosen contained mistakes, often intentional, because these false indications are the only way of preventing maps from being copied.

These maps concealed the earth more than they revealed it. The renewal of cartography during the last century had already suggested ...