MAPPING UNCERTAIN LANDSCAPE
Sonya Isupova
Diploma Project 2023

Witnessing changes of the Ukrainian landscape: surveilling, tracking and targeting, diagramming, drawing, and redrawing the segments of Ukrainian terrain using a map-making machine.

Everything started with the map. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, global news agencies, intelligence agencies, independent cartographers, and investiga- tive journalists have pored over the map. They all seek to create the simplest, most understand- able, and visually appealing map to explain the complex realities of this brutal, unprovoked war. Yet these maps are full of reductionist practices that tend to simplify and erase the reality of what they are supposed to represent. This project is a continuation on my master thesis “Mapping Uncertain Landscape”, where I analyzed Ukrainian modern cartography related to the war in Ukraine and compared various cartographic sources. Exploring the question of accuracy when mapping the uncertainties of war I could see the problems and possible alternatives to modern cartographic practices.

The installation explores the relationship between humans and machines, the map maker, and the map. Looking closer at the remote-sensing infrastructures, and their problematics. As well as questioning maps and mapping processes all in order to sense changes in the landscape that are occurring daily due to the current war in Ukraine. Sonya Isupova built a machine, a metaphorical satellite, hovering above the land, mapping the data with a limited amount of accuracy, transform- ing satellite images into maps of the territory.

Materials:
paper rolls, ink markers

Size:
Size of installation: 30m of paper + 3m + 3m Size of machine; 90x60cm

Tutor: Dominic Robson

Music: Aleyna Günay
Special thank you to Hsuan Lee, Emile Demerliac, Joseph Popper

Photography: Guillaume Collignon

IG: @sonya.isupova

Project Website
portfolio website