Carte de ContinuOnus

Carte de ContinuOnus is part interactive website, part public sculpture, part video installation, and was first presented in the exhibition Yet, it moves! at Copenhagen Contemporary art centre in 2023. The artwork is inspired by the Carte de Tendre, a ‘map of tenderness’ created by French writer Madeleine de Scudéry and her group of friends in 1653–54, which soon after appeared as an engraving in Scudéry’s novel Clélie.

The Carte de Tendre depicted a bird’s-eye view of an allegorical landscape with features named for different emotions. It was made at a time when the author and her circle were tackling quite radical questions of self-determination, women’s rights, and how an individual’s interiority can have consequences for society at large. The river running through the Carte follows the outlines of a uterus, further linking the psycho-geographic map to the female body as a site of journey and reflection.

When visiting the web component Carte de ContinuOnus, you are immediately invited to answer this question: ‘What do you want the future to remember?’.

Each person can type a response in a text-input field, with the option to include their name and/or location. After submitting their memory, the user is taken to a colourful adaptation of the Carte de Tendre: its original borders stretch outwards in an elaborate digital patchwork of saturated marks whose patterns riff on the central landscape motifs. When one zooms out, the map’s uneven edges evoke a tiled collage and suggest that its construction could still continue. Zooming out even further triggers a shift from a flat view to the same map wrapped like a skin around a 3D digital object.

The object is a sculptural interpretation of the hippocampus, the part of the human brain that stores memories. In its formal ambiguity, the object also feels suggestive of a back-bending female figure, or a model of the human clitoris organ, creating a rhyme with the shape and association of the Carte de Tendre’s uterus-like river.

When the user zooms back in, word tags, in English, are visible across the flat map, tying different locations to different emotions, as Scudéry’s cohort did centuries ago. A second question unfurls across the screen: ‘If your memory was found in the future, how do you think it would make the future feel?’ The user is then prompted to place their statement on the map, effectively attaching it to one or more emotions and contributing to the collective Carte de ContinuOnus mnemonic. 

ContinuOnus is a linguistic blend of the words continuous and onus. By merging them into one, it proposes that the future, which is always already entangled in the past, carries with it obligations and responsibilities. The English word onus refers to ‘something that is one’s duty or responsibility’ and is often culturally understood with a negative valence. In an individualist society, onus can suggest obligations that diminish one’s personal freedom and, as such, one’s future.

However, in a more collective-minded framework, freedom is not always freedom from obligations and relations, but something that assumes that individuals and communities flourish through interdependence. ContinuOnus is an attempt to reclaim our shared onus as a privilege that unfolds from the present into the future. The stories we assign to words, like maps, orient our worldviews.

By inviting visitors of Carte de ContinuOnus to place their memories for the future, the cumulative meshwork of collective memories gives further shape to the dynamic map, which stands as a metaphor for future directions, movements, and response-ability.

As contributors place their memories on the map, they imagine how future others might come to feel about each memory. A new space is opened up – a space for questions and reflections about what and which kind of future the user attributes their memory to. By building on these collective reflections, users are prompted to imagine other futures, and perhaps also actions that could be taken today to achieve those possibilities.

The Carte de ContinuOnus website can be reached here. More information on Carte de ContinuOnus can be found here. More information on Future de ContinusOnus can be found here. More information on Yet, It Moves! can be found at Copenhagen Contemporary.

Additional reading

Michael Levin, "Self-Improvising Memory"

Daniel Schacter, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory"

Interview with Helene Nymann by Stine Lundberg Hansen in Art Matter, Helene Nymann: "Den viden, der kommer ud af kunst, er reel viden"