Subjective Editions

Subjective Editions is a publishing initiative that develops and disseminates bottom-up engaged mapping publications. An expanding series of subjective atlases is being made in collaboration with local communities. These volumes map out a country, region or geopolitical entity in a personal way by the inhabitants themselves.

During several workshops artists, designers, photographers and architects are invited to map their country, environment or social concerns from their own perspective. They capture their engagement in maps, graphs, inventories, flags or drawings. Personal involvement is the starting point to produce human, unconventional and just images. Each work stems from involvement with the subjects and takes an engaged, critical and transparent position, not a neutral or so-called objective one. As such, the contributions not only show their own story, but also develop meta-reflections on contemporary forms of living together and community building.

This creative trajectory illustrates how design can be an important tool for soft power and how it helps to imagine a different future. The Subjective Atlas is therefore also a proposition for a creative mentality that is politically engaged, socially sensitive, collaborative in nature and trans-disciplinary in its method, to expose the consequences of political change, but discreetly, implicitly and not as a goal.

The publications show, above all, a complex reality that is often blinded by overly simplistic media images. As a powerful series of alternative, copyright-free cartographies they can serve as an inspiring, publicly available tool to critically question the apparently objective.