Backdrop maps for an art project in Venice

Visual artist Marina Maniadaki is working on her project Lost Relative Trail, for which she hid ten old family pictures in niches around Venice, and then observed what they meant to the people who found them. She will be registering this experience into a new booklet, and wanted to accompany her descriptions and letters by some hand drawn illustrations of the lost hiding spots in the form of a map.

After settling on the area of interest and map style, we decided that the best format to support the drawing would be fixed backdrops for Marina’s lightbox device, providing a geographical base as well as some contextual information from the city. I made four A1 backdrops of the same area out of OpenStreetMap data and Google Satellite Imagery, showing points of interest to the project, a bird’s eye view and a blue-red wireframe (both 2D and 3D) to support pencil drawing.