Questioning World Maps with Patricia Vester
© Illustration: Patricia Vester
Graphic with green geometric shapes connected by red lines in a circular layout.
Past events
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The school wall map Germany’s Colonies hangs in the room War of the BERLIN GLOBAL exhibition. It was used in classrooms from 1937 and shows how wars were prepared in schools. Colonial revisionist demands and aggressive National Socialist propaganda will soon be less present and visible in the exhibition space.

During this year’s “Black History Month”, illustrator and intervention designer Patricia Vester worked with interested visitors to develop new perspectives on how maps are handled.

Patricia Vester explored ways of approaching historical map material sensitively and invited visitors to join her on this journey. The result is a visual, critical exploration of school maps and teaching materials from German publishing history. Themes include fears and claims to space, scanned cities, digital wandering and travelling as a Black German.

In this event, she presents the outcomes, talks about the collective design process and shows the short film created during the project.

The film documentation also serves as a freely accessible resource for teachers to use in the classroom.

Participants

Patricia Vester

Patricia Vester is an illustrator, intervention designer, activist, curator, process facilitator and museum consultant on colonial contexts and museum practice, as well as a developer of anti-discrimination approaches to art and cultural education. She was born in Germany to a German mother and a Ghanaian father. Her interest lies in colonial traces and the lack of spaces for addressing them. She seeks dialogue on possible educational formats and creates comics and graphic novels as workbooks. Her work can be found in institutions such as the Museum Utopie und Alltag, Stadtmuseum Cottbus, Museen Stade, Stiftung Preußische Schlösser und Gärten, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and the Brandenburg Museum für Zukunft, Gegenwart und Geschichte.

Belongs to

In the Humboldt Forum's foyer there is a 17 meter high media tower, called "cosmograph". It gives visitors comprehensive information about their visit and can transform into an art and light installation.
© SHF / David von Becker
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