Map Your Heartbreak
As part of its recent exhibition, Heartbreak, RUYA MAPS asked its visitors the question ‘how might heartbreak have affected your sense of place?’
An online submissions form let users enter sites of heartbreak with accompanying commentary. These submissions were then uploaded to an interactive map where visitors could compare the locations of the public’s heartbreaks with those of the exhibition’s artists and curatorial influences. Locations included:
“When your job leads you away from the city you lived in for 27 years, it doesn’t matter how beautiful is the place you are or if it’s only 2 hours train from home. That place will never be home.”
📌 Train platforms
📌 Childhood homes
📌 Street corners
📌 Park benches
📌 Waiting rooms
“I have lost my language. French was my land, the language, not the country itself. The pain will never get better. Of course, there is a new life with some good things within it but the wound, it seems, will never heal. It is place and time.⠀Dying in this foreign language, surrounded by the sounds of this foreign language is such a pain. Place and sound. Fortunately there is art. Fortunately there is work of art like the ones in your project.
”
“At the train station, waiting to make my connection, I learnt of a friend’s loss”
The interactive map consisted of three layers that reflect different experiences of heartbreak. The first charts the journey of Dido and Aeneas in Virgil’s The Aeneid, and Layla and Majnun from Nizami’s Khamsa. The second layer marks locations that are linked to the artists whose works are on show in the exhibition - their place of birth, or a site that their work responds to. The third layer is made up of the crowd sourced sites of heartbreak.
The country that was submitted most often as having sites of heartbreak for visitors was Italy, followed by the USA and UK. Close behind were: Germany, France, Spain, China, Morocco, Greece, Turkey and Canada. One of the most connected locations on the map was Istanbul, Turkey. Not only is it a site given through public submissions, it is also the home town of artist Füsun Onur and near to Aeneadae where Aneneas stops during his journey in Book II of The Aeneid.