Fear and Floating

This cartographic work was designed for and together with dr. Alessio Iocchi, Senior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute on International Affairs, as explanatory support to his research work on Boko Haram activities in the Lake Chad area.

The dominant color of the three cartographic plates is sand. The aim is to immediately convey to the user of the map the arid climatic conditions of the territory it represents: the Sahel. The base map is oriented with the north up because the researcher, the cartographer and the imagined users of the map will be mostly Western people and there has been no need to question this cartographic convention.

The Sahel, from the Arabic Sahil “edge of the desert”, is a transitional belt between the Sahara desert in the north and the savannah in the south and extends from east to west throughout Africa. To communicate the importance of this geographical factor in influencing events in these territories, the base map maintains a chromatic transition from the shades of sand to those of dull green.

The central green detachment of the Lake Chad area allows you to immediately communicate the ecological and economic importance of this lake basin.

Regarding the topographical elements, we chose to mark the names of the places that appear in the research work, the land and river communication routes and the national borders. Borders emerge strongly, because they are the cause and the action space in which the events narrated by the research take place.

The use of satellite images refers to a contemporary aesthetic of surveillance, control, of the eye observing from above, making explicit the observer’s extraneousness to the analyzed context.

For the icons, graphic elements and some texts it was decided to use yellow after a work of excluding other colors. Red was excluded to avoid conveying feelings of alarm, green to avoid tracing all the activities in the Lake Chad area to an Islamic matrix, assumption that instead the research work tends to deconstruct.