Up-side Down

In my graduation project at École Supérieure des Arts Visuels de Marrakech (ESAVM), I initiated a study exploring the profound story of mapmaking and cartography, introducing Up-side Down.

The first part of the project is a bilingual Arabic and English book, featuring three major subjects. The first one explores a brief understanding of the impact of cartography on our lives and its political power; the second part accentuates the north and south’s pre-12th-century history, the Arab Golden Age, studying a number of Islamic maps and manuscripts and revealing how the Arabs used to see the north; and the last section of the book covers the attempts of representing the world on a two-dimensional surface using the map projections, transferring the spherical network of parallels and meridians of the globe into a flat surface, these attempts had various intentions and some of them have deceptively represented the world in order to draw a contrast between religions and races.

The book is a paperback double-sided halves bound together with one part rotated 180° relative to the other (also known as the dos–à–dos binding), serving the script direction of each language, and emphasizing the Up-side Down notion.

On the second part of the project comes the posters, following the third chapter of the book, featuring a set of three parodical map projections that have been grimly distorted to accentuate the subject.

The digital calligraphy that I used is in Naskh script, composed with a design software for Arabic calligraphy called eMashq.com. The font used for the Arabic body text is Nassim Arabic. For the English texts I paired Kessler and JJannon.

See more images on my Behance and Instagram accounts.