Intimate Sea Map - Print

The "Intimate Sea" Map made by the artist and navigator Agathe Marín has an amount of emotional, symbolic and poetic content about our ocean that makes you want to look at it for days. We will first tell you about the qualities of the map, and then, you will be able to read where all this incredible creation came from.

• Measurements: 91x36cm
• Printing: digital on 180gr Canson PhotoMatt paper, specialized in long-lasting and art reproduction.
• Artist: Agathe Marin

Do you want to know what it is about and where this map came from?

(Ágathe): I was born in the North Atlantic, not so far from the port of Saint Malo from where, in the past, the clippers set sail for Valparaíso. Girl, I dreamed of Cape Horn and the storms of the Pacific. I don't know when I first learned about Valparaíso. Perhaps it was in a sailor's song or in a novel... Valparaíso is like the fifty howlers, Moby Dick or the song of the whales. It is not known if it is real or fictional. Nor what country does it belong to, if it belongs to any country. I learned that Valparaíso was bigger, like Chiloé or Cape Horn were in Chile. So I wanted to know that country so far away, on the edge of the Pacific, the largest ocean in the world.

But when I arrived in Chile I was disappointed, to be honest. I arrived in a land without sea. A strip of land floating in a void, just as it appears on almost all maps.

And the sea, when it appeared, was just a distant blue speck on our windows. There was no way to get close. There was no way to find stories. Everyone seemed indifferent to that unknown blue immensity. As if there was no mystery there, as if it were just water. Because the sea without stories, without legends is only water, blue, gray, green, terribly frozen.

I looked for how to embark. And I was lucky enough to sail in Valparaíso, in Chiloé and in the deep South. I found whales, sea lions, hidden submarines, Yagan and Chilote legends, smells of roasted coffee and wood cooking that mixed with the salt of the wind. I found a sea that is not drawn in the shadow of the earth but rather overflows it... I let my finger caress nautical charts, and I learned from the currents and the winds of the Pacific, that "marine pulse of the heart of the earth, that ocean where this accursed white sperm whale swims!” (Moby Dick).

When I got back to land, I wanted to draw another map of Chile. Upside down map. Where the earth would be white, empty and the sea a deep place, full of stories and characters. I wanted to draw the map of the sea that made me dream, with my childhood readings, the giant kelp forests or the 8000 meter depth of the Atacama Trench. I wanted to draw the imaginary that this immense and so unknown world awakens for me.

At first I drew on top of a nautical chart. Looking north. Following the marine codes. But one day, I turned the map around, revealing another silhouette of our country. A country drawn by the wind and waves. As if we were on the edge of the earth looking towards the immensity, towards the west. The west is our daily horizon for us who inhabit the Chilean coast. Only depressions and storms come from the north. Ships and adventures arrive from the west. However, that west is like an empty horizon, which we do not know how to decipher and which we do not dare to dream of. It's a bit like heaven. We know some constellations, which we remember when we are far from the city lights. But in our daily life, the sky is only black, like the sea is only blue. We don't know how to decipher it. I wanted to make a map to start dreaming and deciphering the Chilean sea.

I turned the map so that whoever looks at it feels a bit lost, feet on the edge of the earth, facing an unknown world, a magical and poetic territory, with its own language and codes, a world that remains to be explored and which we need maps, symbols, compasses and myths...