August 04, 2021 - October 11, 2021
Made
from prints on rice paper which has been covered in latex, the elements
constituting The Interior (with fish) are positioned in such a way that
they accord with a map of Africa by G. Blaeu that was included in the Grooten
Atlas (1648–1665). Dixie’s choice of a map by Blaeu is significant. Maps such
as the one Dixie quotes here speak of an imperative to harness new
topographical knowledge for the successful establishment of the commercial
interests of the Dutch East India Company. Signifying the end of the
speculative geography that had been a feature of the sixteenth century, the
seventeenth-century map ‘laid claims to its presence as a studiedly transparent
image of an increasingly known world’ (Brotton 1997, 186). Dixie has, however,
collapsed her reference to Blaeu with a second discourse – one that involves
another kind of mapping. Presented as a substitute for the African continent,
but adapted to accord with its contours, a medical diagram forms the central
motif of The Interior. But this is no general map of the body, and
instead one of an especially mysterious physiognomic terrain – female
reproductive organs. The geographies of dark Africa and female reproductive
anatomy have thus both, as it were, been charted and supposedly fixed through
geographical and medical inquiry: as Dixie’s juxtaposition of these two
discourses makes clear, to a masculine scientific imagination it seemed that
the equally troublesome uncertainties signified by both of these ‘others’ –
foreign topography and woman – might be overcome by their being methodically
diagrammed.
