Topographies

Topographies is a concertina book by the Swiss artist Monica Ursina Jäger that reproduces a single collage of buildings and landscapes at full length.

Kodoji Press published it in 2014 as a 54-page concertina in a slipcase, in a limited edition of 300 copies. Twelvebooks puts the unfolded collage at nearly twelve meters. Jäger made it with Winfried Heininger from hundreds of images in her working archive, which mixes her own photographs with pictures found in print and online, of rendered as well as completed buildings. Readers can turn the folds one by one or open the whole length. The route runs through man-made, forested and barren landscapes, with an emphasis on the architectural ambitions of the 1960s. The scenes are largely black and white with accents of color, and few show any sign of human life. A dazzle pattern, a bold graphic camouflage used mainly in the First World War, runs along the back and bleeds over onto the front. According to twelvebooks, it was made by recording the forms produced by applying such a pattern to a rendered, fictional landscape.

Jäger was born in Thalwil, Switzerland, in 1974 and studied for an MFA at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2006 to 2008. Her website says she lives and works in London and Zurich and works with drawing, collage, installation and video on space, landscape and architecture. Its CV lists the Swiss Art Award among her awards and a 2019 show, Shifting Topographies, at the Museum Franz Gertsch in Burgdorf.