IMAGO MUNDI is a world unto itself in the heart of the new library — or rather, the image of a world of its own. The map serves as an underpinning, a patterning that unleashes our imagination. The island as a clearly demarcated piece of land.
IMAGO MUNDI is composed of three distinct layers: The criss-crossing chords of a portolan chart are inscribed on the ground in the reading courtyard, whilst the outlines of islands are dotted across the windows opening onto this space. Looking through the panes, these schematically sketched isles are overlaid upon the mesh of lines on the ground.
Views, reflections, and shadows come together in sections to form a plan. Different perspectives and changing light conditions transform the plan anew at every time of day and season.
Its limited frame turns the isle into a theatrical space: this frame almost inevitably transforms everything that happens within it into a story, an intimate drama in an unspecified setting, into the stuff that dreams are made on.
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands
