AkademieGalerie | Naho Matsuda "Tracing the ocean with your hands"

In the organizer's words:

The exhibition Tracing the Ocean explores how we try to describe and represent the world around us. Using ceramics, videos and paper sculptures, it explores our relationship with marine animals through hand signs and distortions of geographical space in the history of cartography.

Marine animal hand signals are used underwater to communicate animal sightings. In most cases, the hand signals mimic the appearance and movements of the animals. Sometimes they also resemble the animal's namesake. They are used internationally by divers and marine biologists.

Map projections are a technique for representing the curved surface of the earth in two dimensions. Mapping a three-dimensional sphere in this way leads to distortions and offers an infinite number of ways in which a sphere can be mapped onto a flat map. The best-known attempt is the rectangular Mercator projection from the 16th century.