Like a fruit held in the hand

Among the most distinctive features of Buddhist maps of the Edo Period, including Hotan’s, was the displacement of the axis mundi, or central point of the map. In recognition of the region’s centrality to the faith, many maps displayed a strong Indo-centrism, placing India at the center and playing with geographic scale to represent nations based on their proximity to Buddhism.

 

This perspective-based reconfiguration of space serves as a useful ideological prompt. Even within notions of “scientific” mapping, there is no objective way of determining a cartographic “centre”. A centre may be geometrically determined, based on political significance, or demographically shaped. Building on the flexibility of this notion, Where is the Heart of the City is a site-specific, participatory intervention that privileges personal definitions of valuable space,  first realised as part of the exhibition begin at the end of the map at Bikaner House, New Delhi and later adapted at the MMCA residency, Seoul. Consisting of a large-scale flex map, a set of stickers, and a prompt, the piece serves as an invitation. Participants, primarily long-term residents of the city,  are asked to mark where the heart of the city - its most important part - lies for them. This could be their current home, or a past one, a place of work, the school or university they went to, their favourite picnic spot, or any place that remains foremost in their memories of the city. 

 

In Moriya City, the installation was set up at City Hall, a building that sits at the administrative and physical heart of the city. While Moriya is a relatively young city, having received official status only in 2002, it has a long and mullti-faceted history: as a castle town during the Edo period, as a hub of river transportation in the 1930s and 40s, and as a merged town made up of Moriya, Koya, Ono, and Oisawa in the 1950s. In recognition of these historical shifts, and the subsequent redrawing of city lines, the installation aimed to supplement official cartographic narratives with the perspective of those who move through and occupy it everyday. Each sticker served as a data point, reconfiguring spaces that might seem unremarkable as places of deep personal meaning. Taken together, they revealed how variable the idea of a city’s heart can be, and how pliable, by extension, ideas of valuable space can be.