Czech Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

I am admittedly a map geek. I pour over maps searching for the inside nuances of a place, the ways in which landscape, city planning, history and culture have laid their hand on a location. The act of looking becomes as much of an act of transforming myself to another place, one I’ve never seen before. It’s a sneak preview of events to come, a way to prepare myself for the location and experiences that await. Author Lucy Lippard says, “For map-lovers, maps are about visualizing the places you’ve never been and recalling the ones you have been to. A map can be memory or anticipation in graphic code.”1 But for me, maps are also a way of precaution, a way to orient myself to the geography of an unknown place. They are a way to help me from getting lost amid the new and exotic. They are an escape route.

But I have a love/hate relationship with maps. As much as they are a way of understanding a place, an exit plan and a compass, they are also created with an intent. Lippard says, “The “naturalization” of maps--the myth that maps show the world the way it really is--veils the fact that maps are cultural and even individual creations that embody points of view. They map only what the authors or their employers want to show.”2 Information is added or left out of a map, out of a visual depiction of a location, because of what the cartographer wishes to emphasize, and that may actually distance someone from understanding and not getting to understand the place.

My eyes ran through the medieval maze.....

When I was told that I would attend a studio residency in Slavonice, Czech this spring to work with landscape architects and environmental design students I saw my chance to learn as much as possible about how to fabricate and imagine a culture onto a map. Mostly I wanted to travel to Czech, visit Prague, and go to the border of the Iron Curtain. The first thing that I did? I looked on a map. Prague looked amazing, and with the help of Google Maps I was able to zoom into the city structure and move myself through the maze and zig-zag of medieval city planning, looking for clues to the lay of the land and where people would congregate. Where were the churches and cathedrals, the pedestrian bridges and views across the river? What would the city look like when I arrived? Next I turned to Slavonice, which was nestled into an area near what is called the European Greenbelt, the demilitarization zone along the Iron Curtain which created a unique environmental niche because a lack of industrial buildup. I measured the distance to the border and I plotted my escape.

But when we arrived things weren’t as they had appeared on the satellite map. Snow greeted us in Prague, and it was much more prevalent in the villages near the border. Slavonice itself was the vision of quaintness, much more picturesque than the top down maps had shown, but the border was most mysterious. It was nonexistent.

I guess you can't see the white line of the border because of the snow.

I wasn’t expecting a dashed line to be carved into the farmland on the border of the Iron Curtain, but I also wasn’t expecting a line that was so contentious to so many people for so long to have vanished. We crossed the border at a checkpoint a kilometer from Slavonice without fanfare or even a greeting from an Austrian border patrol official which made the entrance into a new country seem much more imaginary and surreal than it really was.


Later that day we took a tour through the surrounding countryside of Czech and visited the Iron Curtain Museum, which is not more than a fence and guard tower along one of the most heavily secured portions of the Czech border.

This spot was where the sand trap was. Now it's a museum to over-preparedness.

At one time there were four parallel electrified fences with a sand trap ten meters wide in the center with guard towers every fifty feet. Now the fence just ends. This erosion of the border conflict wasn’t on the map, but the distinct line of “Austria” and “Czech” that demarcates the difference between here and there was.

The Iron Curtain just ends....

In Prague, the city was overcast and gray. I was expecting the sunny and bright day when the satellite images were taken, but it seems like Google picked the one day in Prague when you can see the sun. Prague bustles with its own haunting vibrations and dark, dank, stone filled streets and monochromatic neighborhoods, seemingly proud of its resistance to change and progress. But the layered and complex nature of the town doesn’t come out in the overhead maps, only the homogeneous nature that satellite imagery draws on the maps. This uniform representation of the world through Google Maps dulls the experience, and takes places that are quite diverse and vibrant and makes them uniform and stale.

Now which place would you rather travel to? Yep, I'd rather be in the gloomy place also.

In the end, what I took from that place, the experiences that I had with it, were not consistent with what I had planned for by observing a place through maps, they were actually much richer and diverse. Lippard states, “A map is a composite of places, and like a place, it hides as much as it reveals.”3 Maybe I was asking too much of a map to impart to me a foreign culture and distant locale, but my experiences didn’t line up with my expectations. The map tricked me into thinking that distant places are alike all the world over, but I can still use them to imagine places that move to their own beat and sing their own song.


1 The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard, 1997, p. 77
2 Lippard, p. 78
3 Lippard, p. 82