Multiculturalism, pluralism, liberalism—these ideals are more and more co-opted for free trade and the logic of neoliberal globalization instead of being ends in themselves. Global citizens are now global consumers. Twenty years into the new century, the United Nations and most cosmopolitan projects face widespread cynicism, all the while as we trade in a millennia of human complexity and ingenuity for technological idolatry. For a lack of inspiration, we’re losing what makes our world rich. 

 

Though our planetary ecosystems are in dire straits, we also stand to lose the lion’s share of cultural wisdom that has made it thus far in human history. 

 

To take action, we must challenge our imaginaries. After all, the medium is very much the message. For decades, humanity as a species was represented by a gold disk now floating in deep space, and more recently by an arbitrary photograph of an Akha couple in northern Thailand. Humanity's backdrop, the world—both as a lived reality and an imaginary—is represented, however, by a political world map designed to make sense to elementary school students. Atlas Altera is a fictional and cartographic exercise to reimagine that backdrop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Atlas Altera is a response to how we geographically depict and imagine the world we live in.  Instead of achieving a sterile and homogenizing "end of history," in the strange yet familiar world of Altera, cultural differences flourish. The worldbuilding is developed using alternate history scenarios whenever it suits the overall goal of the project, which is to maximize difference. Though there is some grounding in history, the project also diverges in that, as Aristotle observed in poetry, instead of depicting things that have been or as they are, it describes things that might be.

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The project stems from a belief much like Richard Rorty’s, that to take meaningful action is to depict the past in new ways. Here, it is not just the past but all that exists which is renewed. But unlike irredentist fantasies and conventional alternate history, Atlas Altera is about making room for those that lost out in the drawing up of borders without the winner takes all logic. It’s about making space for those currently clinging on in the margins, so they too may, as Wade Davis says, secure a place at the table of human wisdom.

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In recognizing how the classroom prop of a political map has the power to rally and erase, and in being pragmatic with territoriality, Atlas Altera plays out the logic of the twentieth century nation-state paradigm and puts into focus countries as the base unit to illuminate the geographic diversities in our own timeline—peoples and their dialects, knowings, wisdoms, practices, traditions, beliefs—which everyday threaten to vanish.

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Apart from thematic wall maps, the lore of Atlas Altera is doled out in map plates and chorographic narratives, which can be characterized as a sort of encyclopaedic travel writing style, and which is inspired by the tradition of chorography and regional geography more in line with Carl Sauer than Vidal de la Blache or Friedrich Ratzel.