It’s a Match!
Petter Hellström and Toby Yuen-Gen Liang on Seeing Blank Spaces

Rather than lectures, this event series is a staged conversation, clash or celebration of two people with two distinct positions. Sometimes a blind date, sometimes a fierce competition, sometimes a surprising counterpart, or the perfect fit, in these matches the two speakers will first each present their perspective on a given theme or project, to then discuss divergences or conflations with the audience. From fiery disagreements to harmonious affirmations, the conversation series organized by the Lise Meitner Group “Coded Objects” aims to refract perspectives on historical narratives as well as reconstruct creative processes.

This session brings together two historians, each of whom examines the relationship between knowledge and representation by analyzing the curious presence of blank space on geographical maps and architectural plans of Africa created between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Historians agree, and have long agreed, that European maps of Africa underwent important changes in the eighteenth century, and that these changes are somehow encoded in the large, blank spaces seen on maps produced from the mid-eighteenth century onward. While the large-scale appearance of unmapped, blank spaces in previously mapped regions of Africa has been conventionally rationalised as the by-product of improved scientific standards, Petter Hellström contends that the development presents historians with a complex problem yet to be resolved. How are we to make sense of this apparent shift from knowledge to ignorance? Whose knowledge was it that disappeared? In scholarly literature, the term unmapping has sometimes been used to denote a critical operation meant to undermine oppressive power relations. In this talk, by contrast, he will use the term in a more literal sense to denote the large-scale suppression of previously represented data on maps.

Toby Yuen-Gen Liang looks back at an earlier era, in which the advent of architectural plans in the European context coincided with Iberian conquests in North Africa starting in the fifteenth century. Hand-drawn on-location in Maghribi towns, these plans feature fortification works. However, large areas of blank space also pervade the images, seemingly erasing representations of the fraught subjectivities of Christian-Muslim contact. His work studies the interplays of lines and blank spaces to uncover how the plans helped physically and conceptually construct a new intercultural borderland. Rather than seeing blankness as devoid of visual information, he contends that it positively articulated spatial, political, military, and social arguments. A focus on architectural plans produced under the direction of Don Juan de Austria following the 1573 Habsburg conquest of Ottoman Tunis will illustrate these dynamics. By bringing historical method, visual analysis, and architectural and cartographic theories together with a thick ecosystem including visual, documentary, and narrative sources, this research advances a new approach to analyze blank space. Ultimately, Liang’s research helps to recover the critical ways that blank space coded architectural plans at the inception of this medium as well as to recontextualize the plans’ early development in the broader context of Islamic North Africa.