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Maps, are naturally "all knowing", clearly anchored at a utopian all
encompassing view point, and conform to professional technical rules, and are subject to a universal code.
The maps create an abstraction of a complex reality, transforming it to geometric shapes and colors,
translating the individual to categories of division by types. The maps return from the office of the
designer and the geographer to a contemporary current reality, as a document with a supposedly impartial
stance. However, it becomes an active participant in dynamic interaction of forming boundaries of claims,
identity, the construction of a shared image of the place, a complex process one sees no end to.
Through manual, laborious work, employing various materials and techniques, Mirjam evolved "mapressions" from the computerized architectural plans of the architect Dov Chernobroda. In the process of the art, the plans lost their utopian, organizing aspect, and were animated in a multi-layered body, in paradoxes, and subjectivity. In a similar way to medieval maps, which were filled with a bodily sense of space, imagination and fantasy, Mirjam Bruck's textile maps also carried the maps to planes of sense, emotion and myth. The map acquired an existence of its own, not just a conceptual or technical abstraction, and not just a form for patriotic sympathy, to be carried on a flag in a street demonstration. The map of the AL-Hanuk neighborhood, Um El-Fahem, is made of tricot and other cheap fabrics, it reacts to changes in the weather due to the constant changes in the cheap materials. In dry heat, for example, it stretches. It is an art work of infinite movements, made up of patches, similar to a bricolage of non-standard houses often seen in the neighborhoods of Um El-Fahem. The map of the village Kara is made up entirely of nets, held together tightly, as if they're only half there, and their fragile existence is spun like a spider's web. Bruck stitched together a map of the Arab settlement Zalafe, an applique and machine stitching with beads and decorations, a map that she
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