ABSTRACT
Le monde et les choses an art piece by Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, is a handwoven map of the world designed using CIA-provided online statistics. While maintaining some selected state borders, it represents geopolitical units' dependence on the division of major resources and key branches of the globalized economy. Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic are not indicated on this map, and neither are other countries that historically and culturally formed Central and Eastern Europe. Le monde et les choses was part of the exhibition All Men Become Sisters at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, a former textile industry center that was abandoned following Poland's capitalist transformation in the 1990s. Piotr Piotrowski's lesson of critical art geography engaging with Central and Eastern Europe as one of many places construed as peripheral has been one of the formative paradigms, working in a particular location to find a way through the economy of attention in a globalizing art world.
