Exhibition: "Karten Wissen Meer. Globalisierung vom Wasser aus"

The exhibition presents maps and other objects from the Perthes Gotha Collection and the Map Collection of the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven. They show how the cartography of the seas from the early 19th century onwards helped to view and understand the world as a whole. This cartography created the conditions for the ever-increasing shipping traffic. Maps showed travellers, merchants and migrants routes in an increasingly dense and closed world. As nautical charts, they enabled increasingly precise navigation, but also as world or rather ocean charts they created an awareness of the contemporary global context with all its distortions.

The exhibition is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and by the Leibniz Action Plan "A World in Motion" and is based on research by a network of scientists from the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt, the University of Bremen and the German Maritime Museum (Bremerhaven) under the title "Karten-Meere".

The exhibition will be on show from 20 July to 17 October 2020, Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. 

And: This week the book "Karten-Meere. Eine Welterzeugung", which accompanies the cartography of the seas with literary and non-literary texts. The texts let their stories emerge from maps or continue where the maps end. They tell of the longings and fantasies that have inscribed themselves on the maps or that can arise from the gaze or the finger journey on maps; they celebrate the reliability of maps or let lofty fantasies fail because of unpredictable reefs and icebergs.

On the occasion of the opening, a small video has been produced, which can be seen on 17 July from 6 pm on https://www.hausderwissenschaft.de/Karten-Wissen-Meer.html and https://www.facebook.com/LeibnizDSM.