Daniel Jablonski presents, at Malta's first Biennale, the series Hy Brazil, installed on the island of Gozo.

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Jablonski's installation focuses on an island born of a cartographic error in the 14th Century, and was perceived for the following five hundred years as a wonderful but, alas, unreachable place. Conceived as a “cartography of errors”, the room in historic Gozo Cittadella uses this phantom island to tell two stories: one about not finding what was being sought, the other about not recognizing what was actually found.

As explorers journeyed further and further afield, geographers had the opportunity to “correct” earlier maps. However, as the island of Brazil had to be there, somewhere, it was moved all the way from the coast of Ireland to Newfoundland. Improvements in map-making, such as scale and coordinates, also enabled explorers to make “true” findings. However, as the objectives of the voyages were always set in advance, Columbus never understood (or admitted) that the place he had set foot on — not one but four times — was not Asia, but a whole new continent.

Much more than places, real or not, phantom islands are emblems of such entanglement between modern science and the colonial unconscious. As writer Malachy Tallack rightly said about Brazil, “it is a ghost, a fiction, a myth and an error. It is all of that and, in the end, it is nothing”.

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