In this blog post, I hope to discuss some of the challenges I faced during this mapping project. To my knowledge, Grace and I were the only group to map Tlon, the imaginary world described by Borges. One of the constant themes in Tlon is its abstract nature, or immaterialism. Immaterialism is a much harder concept to grasp than materialism, as immaterialism is a concept usually reserved for philosophers. So how do we go about mapping a world that places such heavy emphasis on immaterialism? The physical features of Tlon are relatively easy to map, because physical objects are often tangible and capable of being visualized. However, because immaterialism states that objects are only there because they are perceived, the “correct” way to represent this concept is much more subjective. Thus, we decided to focus more on the languages and scientific advancements of Tlon, as those are part of the “abstractness” of Tlon. Furthermore, as described by Borges, some parts of Tlon speak a very unique tongue of language, and in order to represent this, we pasted adjectives all throughout the map, all of which describe a noun or a concept in the map.

Another challenge of this mapping project is also to imagine what Tlon actually looks like. Borges made it clear that Tlon is completely different from the present world we know of today. Not only is Tlon built on assumptions different than ours, their idea of what constitutes physical objects is also different. Therefore, even though Borges described numerous features of Tlon in his writing, such as rivers, mountains, and plains, it is possible that these landscapes resemble nothing like those we are used to seeing.

The biggest challenge however, is trying to imagine what Tlon actually looks like. In our map, we emphasized both the abstract and physical nature of Tlon, but a large part of Tlon is still unknown. In order to emphasize this idea of a still unexplored piece of land, we named the map Terra Incognita. Furthermore, besides mapping parts of Tlon, we also colonized it by naming mountains and rivers after us.