Ali-Moosa Mirza Mirza-Picot Agreement Materials: Maps This piece seeks to convey the frustration and despair felt as a direct result of imperial powers, in the past centuries and still today carving up the world, creating conflict wherever they went and still go. At the same time it seeks to present the opposite feeling of hope for a peaceful world where there is no division, walls and borders which only lead to violence. It is my recreation of the globe in order to represent the world with countries which have endured centuries of oppression, in a new light, flipping the way we usually view the world. Traditional Maps present a distorted image of the world as they represent continents like Africa on a significantly smaller scale. Continents like Europe, the people making these distorted maps, is represented larger. This globe brings attention to that. This is why I used the material of the map to construct it. I see maps and find it strange how there are many straight lines for borders. These are borders made by imperial powers dividing and taking the land at will at events like the secret Skyes-Picot agreement. These arbitrarily drawn borders have only led to conflict still prevalent today as they grouped people of conflicting ethnicities and separated people with shared ethnicities. In some places the map erases these false borders like in Iraq, or the India Pakistan border and in some places it draws our attention to it. In some places I created random straight lines as borders in lands like the Balkans to bring to attention how damaging the imperialists drawing their own borders was. This is also why rather than a spherical globe the shape is rigid with straight lines as a commentary on the imperialism’s strange and dangerous shaping of the world with their borders. It is my hope that with this piece we can be prompted to research more in order to better understand the world we live in, in order to better understand the true roots of the struggles the countries face today.
