Too Much Passion Unsteadies the Hand – Loïs van Albada

Cartography has been perceived as an unbiased practice in the past, the capturing of the world as the world is. But over time it has become clear that map-making is not unbiased as the representation of some matters will always mean the erasing of others. Kei Miller’s poem The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion features a cartographer and a local speaking about the act of map-making. The cartographer explains he makes visible the entirety of a place in simply a glace, and that “too much passion unsteadies the hand”. Through the knitting of this phrase, I have attempted to make that which was supposed to be unbiased, biased. I have chosen the color, the composition, and the thickness of the wool. I have chosen to show the back of the sweater in the zine, thus showing the flaws. Through the zine I have attempted to make clear both my intention as well as the process behind the making of the sweater. The use of wool in the zine and the use of scraps of paper taped onto the map were done in an attempt to convey texture, I wanted a map that was not a two-dimensional piece of paper.