MappaMundi

MappaMundi or This film will change your life.

This film will change your life. That’s not a joke. And if it doesn’t change your life it will at least change your point of view.

In her docu-fiction film MappaMundi, which was premiered at the prestigious SUNDANCE Film Festival, Bady Minck engages with the human view of the world, the globe, the ‘blue planet’ and the history of humankind.

Her view comes from outside, represented by three cosmic cartographers, intelligent beings—gender unspecified—who travel through space and time in a kind of pulsating DNA tube. Suddenly they receive a message: ‘perceiving pulsations’. They approach the blue planet emotionlessly but with professional curiosity and attempt to analyse and establish contact with it: ‘What is your identification code?’.

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How insulting. ‘I am the earth. Terra – for my friends. I don’t need identification codes’. The cartographers accept this self-confidence rooted, as it is, in infinitude. ‘Terra, do you see us?’ The earth, heading towards the cartographers replies with an erotic voice laden with joyful sensuality – ‘Here – I – am!’. It begins to relate to the gaze from outside. The cosmic surveyors’ interest has been piqued: ‘Play back blue planet’s history’. And at this point a journey begins 700 million years in the past and is humorously narrated by the earth itself. ‘For the last few years I have had to deal with some kind of parasite.’ Homo sapiens has been born. Sentences like this create a distance that enables the audience to understand just how fleeting human existence is and how intentionally ideological their self-image is.

Bady Minck spent months researching maps of the world, their origins and geopolitical backgrounds. ‘Take a look under my skin,’ the earth offers. One of the first maps appears, found incised in stone in the Ukraine and dated 13,000 years before our time. Two-dimensional representations of a multi-dimensional world. ‘Well, this is how they made portraits of me 15 000 years ago,’ is Terra’s laconic commentary.

The maps represent the limited (if not closed) horizons of their makers. They show what the principals knew and what they wanted to let other people know. They show who ruled and who can be ruled. They reflect philosophical points of view and make it clear that there really are many different ways of seeing the world centred on where one is at any given point in time. One learns that the word ‘orientation’ derives from the alignment of the map and churches towards Jerusalem – the ORIENT. Whoever is disoriented is simply looking in a non- Christian – and later non-Moslem – direction. Irrespective of whether countries surround the sea or the sea washes the shores of a country, maps also always serve military and commercial interests. Maps from the time of the Roman Empire make that quite clear. In contrast, Buddhist maps do not differentiate between humans, earth and the universe. For Islamic maps of the early medieval period, Mecca is the centre. Countries are conquered – or is it the other way round ‘America discovers Columbus’? Naturally, the American continent was always there. And so, in Bady Minck’s film a sea monster spits out a man sailing under the Spanish flag onto the unknown continent.

Bady Minck uses the historical material with a great deal of verve and humour and in doing so clarifies an interesting circumstance: the more knowledge that humans accumulate about the earth, the narrower their view of it. ‘Separation lines – called borders.’ Once again the earth protests, rejecting human claims of ownership of the planet: ‘I have no lines on my body’. From here on they begin to take an increasingly cosmic perspective, withdrawing from the blue planet, regarding it from the universe, from a great distance, in its infinite beauty. Until the cartographers receive a hazard warning that the view of earth has become obscured by dirt. Digital dirt is literally taking the earth’s breath away. We have arrived in the present. ‘Fast forward time,’ command the cartographers. Thousands and thousands of years later the earth is uninhabited and can breath again. In an aged voice the earth insists on the unassailable truth: ‘I have no lines on my body’. And it moves towards a cosmic vortex that consumes it. It races through this DNA tube of time and space at high speed.

The end of the cosmic frenzy is of breath-taking beauty that is touching and poetic and has a certain elegance at a time when questions about the future of humans and the earth seem to be unanswerable. We leave the cinema feeling weightless, immersed in infinity, consoled and heartened. Those who have understood leave changed.

Renata Schmidtkunz

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Seen from space the planet earth is a blue-green ball set against a hundred million galaxies. There are, perhaps, 100 000 000 000 galaxies and in every fifth one there might be a planet similar to our earth, peopled by beings who may be similar to us. If these beings would set off on an interstellar quest looking for a star with characteristics similar to their home planet, they might encounter the earth. In Bady Minck’s film, MappaMundi, the blue planet is not one object among others but a living organism. In the 1960s Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis which may well have become self-evident for present-day scientists. It proposes that the planet, together with its biosphere should be considered analogous to a living organism. The biosphere consists of complex interactions between the inorganic and the organic that creates a dynamic, self-organizing system. In the anthropocene era humans – now around six billion of us – have become the most important factor for the biological, geological and atmospheric processes on earth.

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In Bady Minck’s MappaMundi the astronauts, humanoid, vegetal-technoid beings, are able to use their advanced technology to have the blue planet converse with. It tells of how, after a long period of geological and biological evolution it has become infected with a species that is trying to domesticate the body of the planet and has contaminated it with artifacts.

Bady Minck’s extra-planetary research team follows the long slow rise of the species homo sapiens by means of maps. All living things have the ability to orientate, from single-cell anaerobic microorganisms upwards. All of them have to orientate themselves in their own environment but only humans are in the position of being able to develop an abstract conception of the world with the aid of signs and language. In other words, to draw maps. The earliest map artifacts that the interplanetary team can retrieve from the planet’s memory come from the Ukraine and Idaho and are dated 13,000 and 10,000 B.C. The rocks with incised lines show landscapes and routes that were vital for early Paleolithic peoples. A map, drawn with raddle on a rock in the settlement of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey – the first large human settlement with urban characteristics – is six thousand years younger. It is estimated that around 7000 B.C. approximately 10,000 people lived in Çatal Hüyük and the raddle sketch is something approximating a plan of the city.

Is a map the portrait of the planet? The ‘animated’ protagonist of MappaMundi is against being portrayed by strokes and lines. But humans continually develop increased abilities to convey their internal visualizations of routes, houses, important landmarks, mountains and rivers using schematic lines. Travelers drawing maps do so not only for themselves but as a means of communication with other travelers. The Bronze-age maps found in Egypt, Jordan, Friesland or Italy allow the deduction that they were for use by travelers. Perhaps Abraham, the Biblical forefather of all travelers, used maps like these. With the help of their time machine, the interplanetary researchers continually uncover new maps for the screen. The increase in the number of maps corresponds to the increase in opportunities for travel which in turn corresponds with the increase in enduring urban structures. So it is no wonder that the first real road maps come from the Roman Empire. The tabula Peutingeriana shows the network of roads in the later period of the ancient Roman Empire that stretched from the British Isles down through the Mediterranean region and Middle East as far as India and Central Asia and indicating the existence of China at the edge of the map. The maps of medieval Christianity and Islam agree because both partake of the Ptolemaic world. The earth is the centre of the planetary system and is a disc surrounded by the waters of Oceanus. Step by step travelers and their cartographers feel their way forward – in China and Korea too – continuously producing new versions of Mappae Mundi. These maps were not aligned with the north pole, as are present-day maps, but towards the east, where the sun rises. Political maps, marking the extent of territorial sovereignty, only started to be drawn in the Late Medieval period and then, of course, during the so-called Age of Discovery. From then on the concern is with spheres of influence, trade routes, cartographies of domination and subjugation, and the number and frequency of maps produced increases. Commensurate with this pattern the political world maps made by the CIA are shown too. And the blue planet resists these just as it rejects the increasing rubbishing of the biosphere. In an extreme fast-forward of time the blue planet finally disappears into the infinity of galactic pulsations.

One might read MappaMundi as a portent if one only read the closing credit where we are informed that the film is based on a true story. The ironic reassurance that no planet was hurt in the making of the film shows, however, that the director is taking advantage of a certain play in the tension of events. Whatever the case, the film crew, along with the audience, belong to the species that has infected the blue planet like an illness. It may, however, be capable of learning. We can but hope.

Ursula Baatz

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