Um atlas é uma colecção de mapas e de outras informações geográficas, astronómicas e cartográficas, tradicionalmente agrupadas em forma de livro, ou, mais recentemente, de website, e que pode incluir informação da mais variada ordem (geopolítica, social, religiosa, económica e ecológica) sobre as diversas regiões de um continente ou país. Pode ainda ser um Atlas ficcional, de terras imaginárias, como The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands (2018), de Huw Lewis-Jones (ed.), cuja capa informa: “It’s one of the first things we discover as children, reading and drawing: Maps have a unique power to transport us to distant lands on wondrous travels. Put a map at the start of a book, and we know an adventure is going to follow. Displaying this truth with beautiful full-color illustrations, The Writer’s Map is an atlas of the journeys that our most creative storytellers have made throughout their lives. This magnificent collection encompasses not only the maps that appear in their books but also the many maps that have inspired them, the sketches that they used while writing, and others that simply sparked their curiosity.” Em 2018, o Kollektiv Orangotango publicou This is Not an Atlas: A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies, e cujo objectivo é veiculado da seguinte forma pelos seus editores: “This Is Not an Atlas gathers more than 40 counter-cartographies from all over the world. This collection shows how maps are created and transformed as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education: from indigenous territories in the Amazon to the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco; from defending commons in Mexico to mapping refugee camps with balloons in Lebanon; from slums in Nairobi to squats in Berlin; from supporting communities in the Philippines to reporting sexual harassment in Cairo. This Is Not an Atlas seeks to inspire, to document the underrepresented, and to be a useful companion when becoming a counter-cartographer yourself.”.
Rogério Miguel Puga
Bibliografia
Huw Lewis-Jones (ed.), The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Kollektiv Orangotango (ed.), This is Not an Atlas: A Global Collection of Counter-Cartographies, Londres, Transcript Verlag, 2018.