ABSTRACT
The making of maps is a sharing of information in which the cartographer chooses to highlight some aspects of spatialized relations over others, what to emphasize and what to minimize. Mirta Kupferminc, who like Kuitca is a Jewish Argentine artist-cartographer of exile, also pries open a space between material reality and its representation. Many of Kupferminc's pieces are literally about maps and use the conventions of map-making. Kupferminc's maps of exile, migration, and dispersion explore the vertigo of the postmodern/post-Holocaust subject. Her paintings and prints return us to a symbolic spatiality reminiscent of the earliest European maps that arrange the Christian world around its center in Jerusalem. In The Lines of Life, Kupferminc's figures seem joyful, merry, almost like a circus parade as they walk the perimeter of the artist's hand. When Derek Walcott wrote in Midsummer that "exiles must make their own maps" he enlisted the vast terrain of the map as metaphor.
