L’Atlas des géographes d’Orbae by François Place : The cartographic eye as poetics of the discovery of geography

Whatever form the map takes, a special geographic image in so far as it lets us see what cannot be seen from anywhere, it is in and of itself an iconic narrative of space. It is the transcription of an eye that would be, according to Christine Buci-Glucksmann, icarian, allegorical, tautological, or entropic 1 .For François Place, author and illustrator of children’s books, the profound project of his Atlas des géographesd’Orbae, published in three volumes between 1996 and 2000, is, in his own terms, a reflection on time and space, on the grand notions tied to the perception of the world and its history, on the relationship of man with his immediate environment. The Atlas functions as a collection of stories gathered into a single album which hopes to comprise a finite world: the world of Orbae. The 26 maps of the Atlas form an alphabet book, an historical account of cartography from the post-Columbian codices to the ordinance survey map of the nineteenth century. They use a same cartographic vocabulary. What I would like to propose in my intervention is a morphological and functional analysis of the maps of this book which contribute to make it “poetics of the discovery of geography,” according to the expression of geographer Eric Dardel. 2