from all over the world – just like Khobby – are reported to spend up to 17 hours a day working online to dupe unsuspecting “clients” into parting with their money.
“Part of the reason Mercator got wide use is because it was widely available for nautical charts, but also because it rings true as a vision of the world to the people who were looking at it, the people whose countries are a little bigger.”Several map projections over time have tried to fill Mercator’s gaps, but all of them compromise on one or more factors. That has made it hard for social justice crusaders looking to support a projection that better represents the Global South.
One cartographer’s claims, though, shook the cartography world in 1973, causing an outpouring of condemnation on the one hand, and on the other, a loyal cult following.German activist Arno Peters declared his Peters Projection as the “only” precise map, and the true alternative to the Mercator model.Peters, whose parents had been imprisoned by Nazis and who focused on social inequalities as a journalist and academic criticised the Mercator projection as “Euro-centred”.
The fervour with which he and his supporters promoted the projection as a scientific feat and a social justice breakthrough bordered on what some called propaganda. It caused concerned groups like the United States National Council of Churches to take notice and immediately adopt the map.Critics, though, were quick to call out Peters on two things. The map, observers pointed out, was only distorted differently: Where the Mercator projection makes areas near the poles appear much larger, the Peters projection relatively represents accurate sizes throughout, but slightly stretches areas near the equator vertically, and areas near the poles horizontally.
“There was also the fact that this map had already been presented by another cartographer decades ago,” Braun said, explaining the second problem.
Scottish scientist James Gall indeed first published an identical projection in a science journal in 1855, but it went unnoticed. There is no proof, some researchers say, that Peters outrightly plagiarised Gall, but critics say his failure to credit the earlier researcher is still problematic.By incredible coincidence, Carmen’s son was employed in the same prison as a social worker decades later, but neither son nor mother knew that. When the whole family came to see an installation at the Public Office of Synthetic Memories last year, her son recognised the prison immediately from his mother’s reconstruction. “It was a kind of closing the loop … it was beautiful,” Garcia says.
Clandestine assembliesThe team was particularly interested in telling stories of civic activists who have played a key role in different social movements in the city over the last 50 years, including those concerning LGBTQ and workers’ rights. While initially the focus was not on the dictatorship era, it “naturally brought us to engage with people who, by the historical circumstances, were activists against the regime,” Dordas explains.
One of them was 74-year-old Jose Carles Vallejo Calderon.Born in Barcelona in 1950 to Republican parents who faced oppression under