paris map

"Ten years ago [sic], the photographer Paola Di Bello recomposed the Paris subway map into a collage of hundreds of small colour photographs. Each shows the spot on the locator maps one finds in every metro station where passengers place their fingerand think, “So, now I’m here.” The result is an unusual map showing Paris as a vital world. A world where major transport hubs and popular places are erased or faded by the touch of countless fingers. Di Bello’s collage is an atlas of Parisian tourism. A particular kind of atlas, in which the impersonal code of classical cartography and thousands of subjective acts are juxtaposed. Not unlike a DJ’s remix, the routes of the metro tracks are layered with the movement of the bodies that travel along them. This atlas of the Parisian subway tells of an eclectic geography, made up of daily routines, tourist sites, brief stops, corridors of flow, forgotten areas, solitary places. It is a geography, not only of spaces, but also of tempos and movements, surprisingly similar to our way of thinking about the contemporary city. Today, atlases in this mode are needed more than ever, not just as a compendium of data, but also as a representation."

in Domus 870 - May 2004.