The (Incomplete) Cosmic Catalogue
Jan van Eyck Printing and Publishing, Maastricht, NLMiriam Hillawi Abraham, 2025
Map Demonstration / 2025
The (Incomplete) Cosmic Catalogue, Jan van Eyck Open Studios, NL
The (Incomplete) Cosmic Catalogue is an output of a research project that was initially commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Architecture as part of the multi-disciplinary research fellowship, The Digita Now: Architecture and Intersectionality in 2022.
Mapping constellations between five specific pre-colonial cosmological examples extending from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa, this work reframes cosmology as a multi-dimensional and scalable practice of situated technologies and embodied
cartographies. The resulting publication which was produced during the Jan van Eyck residency is a culmination of several years of research and exploration into precolonial cosmologies and spatial orders rooted in the African Sahel extending to the Horn of Africa.
“A book of this kind is unavoidably incomplete;
each new edition forms the basis of future editions, which themselves may grow on endlessly.”
- Jorge Luis Borges, El libro de los seres imaginarios, 1967
Etching of Andromeda and Pegasus imprinted in Arabic Gum against the constellations / 2025
The Cosmic Outpost, Jan van Eyck Open Studios, NL
The [Incomplete] Cosmic Catalogue is a generative tool for Black radical imagination and placemaking, existing in a digital-analogue continuum that allows it to grow and mutate with intention. The emerging work is intended as a technology that through embodiment will be resistant to dislocation and dispossession.