In Mappa del Mondo, after Alighiero Boetti (Pictures of Pigment), 2009, Vik Muniz reconstructs one of the Italian postwar artist’s most recognisable bodies of work: the Mappe, a series of embroidered world maps produced in collaboration with Afghan artisans. Begun in the early 1970s, Boetti’s Mappa series transforms the geopolitical image of the globe into a dense field of colour, with each country rendered in the pattern of its national flag. These works reflect on authorship, labour, and the shifting nature of borders.

Muniz’s reconstruction, part of his Pictures of Pigment series, reinterprets Boetti’s Mappa through a radically different material approach. He composes the image from loose, pure pigment, arranging it on a flat surface before photographing it. Whereas Boetti’s maps are carefully stitched and materially stable, Muniz’s version is temporary and unstable. The pigment can easily shift or disperse, meaning the image only fully exists in its photographic form. Muniz has also noted the technical difficulty of the process, as the raw pigments he uses are highly toxic.

By translating Boetti’s intricate, collectively produced cartographies into a precarious field of raw colour, Muniz not only reworks the material logic of the Mappa but also intensifies its conceptual stakes. The shift from textile to pigment collapses permanence into ephemerality, replacing the slow, accumulative labour of embroidery with a process that is immediate yet inherently unstable. In doing so, Muniz foregrounds the act of image-making itself: the map becomes less a fixed representation of geopolitical order than a fleeting construction, contingent on both material and perception.

Ultimately, the work offers a meditation on the fragility of systems – political, visual, and historical – suggesting that, like the dispersed pigment from which it is formed, the structures that organise our understanding of the world are always subject to dissolution and reconfiguration.