I finally found time to visit the exhibition ‘From Academieland to Zelda - Mapping the Fictional and Imaginary’ at Harvard’s Pusey Library.

Ever since I was a kid, I had a fascination with maps. THey not only represented the world in a graphical form, which is the way my brain works, but were also windows to far away places that I longed to discover. The exhibition explores maps from a variety of genres — television, movies, books, video games as well as maps of concepts rather than stories. Regardless of which genre provided the inspirational material, these maps are all remarkable works of fiction in their own right.

From the only North American set of Mercator globes, to maps of Zelda, Twin Peaks, Love land, or The Lord of the Rings, the exhibition is short but sweet. And it will definitely help me in Link’s latest quest.

Perhaps the only criticism is the lack of… criticism. Some of the maps would lend themselves to much more inquisitive criticism, like TinTin’s colonial view of the world, or the insurance company’s view of life progression through diseases.

After that, I enjoyed a stroll through the Harvard Science Center Plaza, where the Institute of Politics set up a big tent with student resources.

Here are some pictures I took, but this Harvard Gazette news piece has much better ones (direct scans of some of the maps, not behind a glass with light reflections and hard angles like mine).