Charting the Invisible

About

The Urban Photographers’ Association (UPA) is an international network
of artists and photographers focusing on contemporary urban life. Showing at Urban Photo Festival, this year members were invited by guest curators Stefano Carnelli and Tanya Houghton to produce collaborative work exploring themes around invisible cartographies from different parts of the globe.

Maps work on the thin boundary between science and art, between rational representation of spatial data and the evocation of the hidden and emotional layers that compose the reality as we experience it. The inner meaning of a bi-dimensional map resides in what is left out of the physical frame, in those evocative elements that convey a full perception of the territory considered and represented.

Cartographies are not only a combination of paper and ink or digital data; their meaning resides in those hidden intangible layers that allow a full comprehension of the charted territory. In a similar way a photographic frame works as a self-contained limit whose meaning stands in what remains out of it.

The omitted, and its evocative meaning, becomes the significance of the image. Charting the Invisible aims to break the boundary of what we traditionally consider the cartographic interpretation of reality. The representation of those hidden layers - emotional, intangible and evocative - becomes
the focus of the works shown in the exhibition.