Мой Атлас

In a short essay entitled "My Atlas," Vilеm Flusser recalls conversations with his fictional writer grandfather about treasured atlases. The first atlas served him to localize the event that he wanted to describe. The second served to obtain an overview of all events. In this sense, and thanks to these two atlases, he could simultaneously dive into the world and resurface again. But a crisis of orientation followed, which gave rise to many atlases: at the end of the 20th century they began to fly apart in different directions. The resulting overwhelming diversity undermined the very purpose of the atlases – to provide reliable direction - because, in Flusser's words, they exploded "in different directions at the same time: in one they took on colors... in another the atlases began to scale...". The third direction of this explosion, as summarized by Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, Gustavo Bernardo, was the covering of one card with another. In another direction, history exploded into geography, and historical atlases appeared. This crisis became a considerable test for my grandfather: he leafed through these atlases and noticed how you can skim through history, and not continue to flow through it continuously, that is, without tracing the chain of events. The story now looked like a poorly projected film: events began to fall apart, scenes suddenly jumped. For my grandfather, this new colorful landscape of atlases became a creative play with history, but at the same time plunged him into bottomless chaos. Eventually, to navigate all these wonderful but confusing possibilities for mapping the world and its history, he purposefully returned to his old atlases in search of meaning and balance.