“The Earth is an Imperfect Ellipsoid” utilizes Al-Bakri’s “Kitab al-Masalik wal-Mamalik” (The Book of Roads and Kingdoms), an eleventh-century Arabic geography text describing major trade routes in West Africa under the Islamic Empire. Today, the original manuscript only exists in fragments. In 2014, Heba Y. Amin embarked on a five-month journey along the same routes, starting the project in Nigeria and traveling to Europe by road. With a theodolite, she documented the contemporary geographies missing from the manuscript. “The gauzy chiaroscuro of the images evokes the visual aesthetics of the historical colonial past, but the subject matter which she captures, lonely wind turbines stationed in the desert, a nest of satellite dishes perched on squat urban rooftops, are unmistakably contemporary. The world documented in Bakri is recognizable to modern viewers by virtue of many of the same economic and cultural forces that drove the chroniclers on whose accounts of the region Bakri’s book is based.” (William Kherbek)

By contrast to Al-Bakri, who never visited West Africa himself, the artist set out to follow the trade routes described, and has added the missing passages in her artistic project. The historic routes, which pass through current crisis regions in some parts, often correspond to today’s paths of migration. As an Egyptian woman travelling through numerous border crossings – Amin required 12 visas – she was frequently confronted by experiences of bureaucratic-sexist power games. Using “Kitab al-Masalik wal-Mamalik” as a travel guide, the project confronts the authored accounts of merchants, traders and travelers who describe geographies through sexually explicit descriptions of the women they encounter. She secretly recorded her interactions with border-patrol officers and surveilled the landscapes she encoutered to document the sexual dynamics of bureaucracy connected to territory.

The project looks at the historical paradigms of technology and urban development connected to contemporary migratory paths. By employing cartographic research and landscape surveillance, the work critiques the predatory view of landscape and the exoticization of women’s bodies in relation to geography.