Disorientating SWANA: A Journey Through Maps

South to North, East to West, where does SWANA begin, where does it manifest? Maps are more than a neutral representation of Earth; they are flattened, edited, labelled, distributed, and along the way, they are imbued with layers of subjectivities. They become an image of a particular worldview, a snapshot of the imagination of a people in a certain time or location. Reading through them reveals gateways to understanding how this world we share has been (and can be) known.

Through tracing over a curated selection of Perso-Arabic world and regional maps from the 9th to the 18th century CE, we slowly unravel the connected histories that formed this cluster of interrelations, existing between a multiplicity of languages, cultures and ways of being that, occasionally, share a sense of belonging.