“Mapscapes” is a body of work that treats maps not as neutral diagrams but as agents that script how we see and mis-see—place. Working between aerial and terrestrial vantage points, the project locates the uncanny in the gap between what satellite images promise and what the ground discloses. Misread hues, hard vector lines, and geometric land-use patterns across the UAE (Al Quaa, Al Khidayrah, Nahil, Al Jubail, Bal Rumaid) become starting points for fieldwork and re-interpretation.

The works reconcile remote sensing with embodied looking. Copper plate photo-etchings translate satellite images into human scale, using dithered matrices and the play of positive/negative space to expose how color errors and projection choices shape perception. A 16mm film—rooted in the physicality of light on celluloid—extends this “cinematic cartography,” dwelling on peripheral scenes where the engineered meets the ecological: pivot-irrigation circles abutting dunes, mangroves and flamingos framed by industrial skylines, fenced landscapes that restrict access yet remain hypervisible from above.

Across prints, film, and digital fabrication, Mapscapes operates as a process of reconsolidation: assembling missing information from both viewpoints to form a contingent whole. The installation includes research coordinates, terrain studies, and a table of materials that plot the project’s routes and methods. Rather than resolve contradictions, the work keeps the viewer moving between overview and encounter, abstraction and texture, data and doubt.

By staging this threshold, Mapscapes asks: What counts as “out of place” and who is authorized to name it? Where do cartographic efficiencies become injustices? Reading landscapes as registers of change, the project proposes a practice of mapping that is accountable to the body, to error, and to the more than human lives that persist within gridded space.

The above includes selected excerpts, film stills, and related documentation. To request the full film or thesis paper, please reach out by email.