Atlas, album. When we look closer, turning the pages, they are assembled with photos of our embodied moments, or with the abstracted mapping of geographic features; both animated by routes of time. There are external social indicators that try to guide us on our particular journey: ‘You are here’ we are sometimes told. ‘The destination is to your right’, among others.
The journey, however, is much more complex. You can be here, but your head can be somewhere else. Or you may have arrived at that place by mistake. The road is like time, it is never exactly the same for others or for oneself. Where once there was a border dividing two states, today there may be only one nation. And in the same way, where there was a common space, perhaps several smaller communities are now settling.
The truth is that as human beings, we need to have a home to return to. A space to surround ourselves with those objects that define us, where you can find respite from the demands of our path and in which a kind of album is configured that explains who we are, where we come from and bets on guessing. where we go.
If the dictionary defines an atlas as ‘a collection of maps, mainly geographical maps in the form of a book or notebook’, and an album as
‘a blank book in which photographs, stamps or other similar objects are kept’.
Openhouse attempts to map far-flung, but personal stories into the form of a magazine—perhaps itself a kind of atlas-album. Our new feature, “Selected”, attempts to share even more informal personal snapshots…more “look at this” rather than “let me tell you”…the objects of our daily life, to which we go to reflect, rest or remember.