La Plate-Forme, laboratoire d’art contemporain (Dunkerque) has invited Jean Attali to design an exhibition based on L’Atlas mondial des villes, a collective work produced in architecture schools (ENSA Paris-Malaquais & ENSA Paris-Belleville). The exhibition project was born of a conviction: the map does not pose a graphic problem, it poses a plastic problem. The aspects of a territory cannot be presented in a uniform way, or according to the standards of conventional cartographic coding alone.

Today’s map calls for imagination and creativity, and must fight against the impoverishment of its uses. It aspires to be an object, an installation: in terms of its dimensions, the links that bind it to other maps, the ways in which it can be read and deciphered, and the inclination to seek out a power of expression appropriate to our knowledge of inhabited space.

The exhibition features dozens of large-format maps, all very different in scale and graphic style, but which together form a powerful image of the processes of internal differentiation that characterise the world of cities today. We have taken the gamble of installing these maps in an art venue: the freedom of formats, scales and modes of representation is designed to reflect the multitude of urban cultures.